Abstract: 

    It has become popular to tap into the "intelligence of the crowd" on the Internet. This talk argues that more often than not, the crowd flips from intelligence to madness, showing more characteristics of football hooligans than complex problem solving behavior. This is in contrast to what I call "creative swarms", where small teams of intrinsically motivated people work together in Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) to invent something radically new. The key difference is in motivation: crowds are motivated by money, power and glory, while swarms are intrinsically motivated by the problems they are trying to solve.

    The talk introduces a collaboration scorecard made up of six key variables – “honest signals” – indicative of creative swarms. The variables are computed by analyzing global communication on the Web, in Twitter, and Wikipedia, in organizations through e-mail, and in small teams through sociometric badges.

     The talk is illustrated by many examples, with emphasis on high-tech firms and healthcare. For instance, it illustrates how customer satisfaction and employee attrition is predicted in a large Indian outsourcing company by analyzing the company’s e-mail archive. It also introduces the Chronic Collaborative Care Network (C3N) at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, where COINs of medical researchers, physicians, patients and their families are working together to improve the lives of patients with Crohn's disease, diabetes, and cystic fibrosis. Analyzing the e-mail archive of the C3N innovation teams and providing them with a process called “virtual mirroring” where the communication behavior of creative teams is mirrored back, helps them to increase creativity by improved communication.