Swarm behavior and organizational teams
Stumble It!Frank Lacombe of the Evolutionary and Swarm Design Group at the University of Calgary offers a good introduction to the concept of Swarm Behavior. Using examples of ants, bees, birds, fish, and termites he identifies the two main advantages of such decentralized systems: robustness and flexibility. The objective of bioteaming is to realise these same two swarm behavior advantages in organisational teams and inter-organisational business networks.
"The swarming behavior of ants, bees, termites, and other social insects has implications far beyond the hive. Swarm intelligence — the collective behavior of independent agents, each responding to local stimuli without supervision — can be used to understand and model phenomena as diverse as blood clotting, highway traffic patterns, gene expression, and immune responses, to name just a few. Swarm technology is proving useful in a wide range of applications including robotics and nanotechnology, molecular biology and medicine, traffic and crowd control, military tactics, and even interactive art."
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Steven Poole, writing for the Guardian on Saturday March 15, reviews "Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration", by Keith Sawyer and concludes that the book's big idea is that there is no such thing as the lone genius: everything turns out to be collaborative.
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Related Collaboration Research & Science Articles
Self-organization is the new structure for business: IBM Research
A new IBM research report suggests that the best analogies for businesses in the future may no longer be the command structures of the military but the self-organising networks found in nature: schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects.
Federated networks and the emergent support economy
Networked individuals are the future of enterprise.
In their enormously impressive (and sometimes intimidating) book “The Support Economy” by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin the authors identify eleven new “Metaprinciples” for the emergent “support economy”.
Update on European virtual network research
VE-Forum is an excellent source of information on European research activity in the virtual networks and clusters area. It has also just has produced a special edition of its Newsletter "DG INFSO D5 Enterprise Networking Clusters" which gives an overview of the huge amount of European Union research underway in this area which includes:
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