In his past life as the executive director of the National Commission on Entrepreneurship, Patrick Von Bargen helped us all to understand how disproportionately important entrepreneurial growth companies are to innovation, net job growth, and economic development.  Furthermore, Columbia University smart guy Amar Bhidé has observed how the origins of such companies are most often characterized by high levels of irreducible uncertainty or ambiguity.  Consequently, an entrepreneur who operates in a highly ambiguous environment has lots of questions (duh!); his or her life is a series of rapid-fire problem solving exercises.  Resolving answers on a just-in-time basis puts a premium on effective communication between the person with the question and the person with the answer.  Lousy (or costly) communications means a greater chance for lousy answers, which means that the uncertainty an entrepreneur faces is more likely to be resolved by the finality of failure.  That's really bad news for the rest of us.

That's the easy part of the analysis.  So what can we do to improve entrepreneurial communication networks?

June Holley, founder of ACENet, noted in a Plexus Institute conference call earlier today that she and her colleagues catalyze a "thousand introductions" for every structured collaboration they facilitate.  As a hub, June can make referrals that, on paper, can shorten the social distance between an entrepreneur with a question and an expert with an answer.  In other words, June acts as an "expertise concierge."  The good news lies in the results that June and ACENet have achieved.  The bad news is that human June, unlike a Web server, isn't scaleable.  As a communication hub for entrepreneurs with questions, she can be overloaded, because her time and attention are limited.  Like venture capitalists, hubs like June operate in an "economy of time," and time is something none of can buy in bulk. [1]

There's at least one other challenge to overcome.  Notwithstanding capacity constraints, we can shrink an entrepreneur's world with the help of hubs like June, but sometimes being "close" on a single dimension isn't enough.  In other words, knowing who to connect with and actually connecting with that person (much less achieving a return on connection) aren't the same thing.  Most people don't like making cold calls, and there's the rub.  The value of an introduction is highly contextual.  If we don't feel sufficient affinity for each other, you are less likely to make (what you perceive to be) a cold call to me asking for help.  You'll turn to your friends and co-workers instead, even if they may have less relevant expertise.

Let me give you a personal example.  I know next to nothing about developing software.  Nevertheless, the demands of my business have lead me to conclude that developing a software tool is necessary.  I've got questions, as you might imagine.  Naturally, I've turned to a friend for help.  As a consequence, I've been referred to a friend of a friend of my friend, who has been described to me as a genius when it comes to software architecture.  Gulp.  Now I'm not particularly shy when it comes to seeking out smart people to learn from, but the gap between my ignorance and a "genius" is a bit daunting.  As Laura Black might point out, effective collaborations are most likely to occur between people whose relative expertise doesn't differ by an order of magnitude.  On the other hand, affinity can be found along a number of dimensions, and if I could only find out more about "Mr. X," I might be able to even the score a bit by finding commonality in a domain in which I'm not a complete rookie.  Nothing.  Can't find a (comprehensible) thing on this guy via Google.  His web site is a blank.  He's an impenetrable software genius hidden behind a steel curtain.  I've already imposed upon my referral network, so I don't feel as if I can call them to learn more.  Consequently, the referring email sits in my inbox, not acted upon.

I hope I don't do something really stupid.

It would be easier if Mr. X and I lived in the same town, of course.  Face to face interaction is a quick (if highly imperfect) way to size up affinity.  That's why proximity still matters.  That puts me at a disadvantage, because I don't live near anybody.  However, while proximity matters, it's not the only thing that matters.  Henri Lipmanowicz knows a thing or two here.  As the former president of Merck Intercontinental, he has a lot of experience in connecting people separated by geographic distance.  To paraphrase something Henri said in this morning's call, it's really important to make it easy for people to discover their commonality.  In other words, if we make affinity transparent, a referral is more likely to translate into a useful connection.

So...by making affinity transparent, we can stimulate successful connections.  Connections are a prerequisite to communication, which allows for problem solving, which makes entrepreneurs more successful, which helps make our communities healthier.  So how do we make affinity transparent when the players are separated by time and distance?  Here's what we've been trying.

I'm an aspiring hub.  Consequently, I do lots of things to help others figure out whether they have any affinity with me.  I maintain this web log.  I have a personal web site that includes my picture, stuff about my kids and hobbies, and lists of books I've read.  I wrote an article for Inc. magazine about questions that I find compelling.  I write a newsletter.  I'm one of those clowns that completes the whole damn personal profile for publication on the Groove.net server.  In short, I try to make it easy for you to find something in common with me.  If you can't, I want to make it easy for you to make a good decision about throwing my contact information in the trash.

In our business, we do some similar things.  Membership in Pioneer Entrepreneurs is a starting point.  If you are a Pioneer Entrepreneur, it makes it easier for you to connect with other Pioneer Entrepreneurs.  Members know that they have some affinity with other members.  In addition, we maintain basic profiles on our members, most of which include web sites.  About a third of our members respond to our plodding and complete online self-introductions, which are made available to other members. [2]  Members come together in a self-selected ways to participate in events such as our Big Idea teleconference series.  In preparation for such events, we prepare briefing memos that reference the aforementioned profiles and self-introductions.  All of this is intended to make it easier for our members to connect directly with each other.

So does any of this work?  To be honest, it's a mixed bag, and very hard to assess.  After all, if we aren't brokering connections directly, it's hard for us to know when connections are being made.  In any case, we continue to find ourselves brokering a lot of introductions, too many of which are of relatively low value.  We need to find more cost effective ways of enabling lots more of those connections having a modest expected value, because those deal with the bulk of the questions our entrepreneurial constitutents face day-in and day-out.  We also need to provide a clear escalation path for high value "wicked" questions -- those difficult to articulate dilemmas that have good-bad vs. right-wrong answers.

That brings me back to that little software project we've got going...

[1] In his latest book, Six Degrees, Duncan Watts provides some intriguing hints at how multiscale networks are required in the face of ambiguity.

[2] Based on page views, these are the most popular feature of our intranet.