Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Sunday, April 27, 2003The latest issue of Complexity* includes an interesting article titled "Dynamics of Social Networks," which addresses how a simple social behaviors can be the building blocks of large scale network characteristics:
We assume that the central mechanism of the dynamics of acquaintance networks is that people are introduced to each other by a common acquaintance (transitive linking)...The small world properties of high clustering and small mean shortest path length, observed in many real-world systems, are achieved by the local rule of transitive linking...Revealing the basic building mechanism for a broad class of social networks adds to the understanding of how these skeletons can emerge from local dynamical rules.
The authors' findings suggest that if one is able to catalyze transitive linking (i.e., referrals to a friend of a friend), it may, indeed, be possible to facilitate the formation of a small world network for, say, entrepreneurs. Not the end game, perhaps, but a significant beginning.
*November/December 2002
