!!The Social Origin of Good Ideas

[http://web.mit.edu/sorensen/www/SOGI.pdf Paper] by [http://gsb.uchicago.edu/fac/ronald.burt Ronald S. Burt]

Burt hypothesises that people whose social network bridges different interest groups are more likely to have good ideas.

He suggests four ways in which this brokerage across structural holes can create valuable ideas:

# By raising awareness of issues in other groups
# Transferring best practice between groups (i.e. better solutions to the same problem)
# Drawing analogies between the issues and solutions in one group and the issues in another group; thus identifying new forms of solution
# Synthesising new beliefs or behaviours that draw on the strengths of both.

As he says, "This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business."

To test the hypothesis he analysed a group of 673 managers in the supply chain operations of a large US electronics company.

All the surveyed individuals were given the opportunity to submit their best idea for improving the business operation and to identify who they discussed ideas with.

The resulting ideas were independently assessed for value by two senior managers in different business units within the operation.

Analysis of the contact network showed strong clustering within business units with ocntaxts to other business units almost always being brokered through managers in the headquarters. The exceptions were just 15 managers who had direct connections with managers in other business units.

Burt derives a measure of network constraint that measures how self-contained is an individual's discussion network - a value of 100 indicating a completely isolated sub-network whereas lower values indicate connections between clusters.

Given the highly clustered nature of the social network Burt says that there were therefore many opportunities for "brokerage". He notes in his conclusion that "managers who acted as brokers betweeen clusters were more likely to express their ideas, less more likely to have their ideas dismissed by senior management and more likely to have their ideas evaluated as valuable."

He goes on to examine whether ideas were acted upon. The surveyed managers who sat within the clusters (and thus were less likely to have their ideas accepted by senior management) seemed to have learned not to express ideas - this he notes makes the structure self-perpetuating.

He identifies further work that could be done to investigate who people did discuss their ideas with to understand whether the new ideas (predominantly from the "brokers") were discussed in their own cluster or with other parts of the business.

[MyWiki:SocialOriginOfGoodIdeasDiscussion "Discuss"]

!See also
* ThoughtStorms:SocialOriginOfGoodIdeas
* [http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/archives/2004/07/27/the-power-of-context/ Synesthesia:The Power of Context]
* [http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/archives/2004/05/28/social-origins-of-good-ideas/ Synesthesia: Social Origin of Good Ideas]
* [http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/archives/2004/12/05/the-social-origin-of-good-ideas-again/ Synesthesia:The Social Origin Of Good Ideas (Again)]
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