Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Tuesday, February 17, 2004Stimulating Network Regeneration
After reading my essay on dynamic entrepreneurial networks, Erik Pages wrote, "I completely agree with your cautions here...if networks fail to regenerate themselves, they can get locked in. And, I would say that generically, there [are] only two ways to avoid that -- bring in new people, or face some external crisis/stimulus that requires new responses." He went on to suggest some examples of ways to add stimuli over time:
- Groups like Young Entrepeneurs' Organization build local peer networks but then also try to link those groups together on a national and global basis.
- In Fargo, North Dakota, the 5:01 Society encourages the active participation of students from North Dakota State University, who bring energy and new perspectives to the group.
- In eastern Idaho, a group of local entrepreneurs have banded together to join the San Jose Software Forum as a way to get the latest industry news and to expand their networks.
Those are all great examples, reminiscent of the multiscale network architecture featured in Duncan Watts' book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. In multiscale networks, meta-teams emerge in order to alleviate information bottlenecks and increase organizational problem-solving capacity in ambiguous environments. For example, Erik and I are both members of a new teleconference-based forum facilitated by the Plexus Institute that brings together a dozen or so people from around the country that are focused on the challenges of stimulating entrepreneurship in the context of regional economic development. We expect that this meta-team will aid in the efficient sharing of knowledge and, consequently, will help spark local thinking. In an entrepreneurial context, having individual local forum members take responsibility for participating in specialist, national or global networks is a way to bring home access to knowledge that would otherwise be out of reach.
