Virtual teams must consider ‘unified communications’ when they are chosing their collaboration tools if they want to be effective according to new research by Cisco. Reported by ElectricNews.Net Sept 20, 2006

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.

Sunday Times Online, May 07, 2006 reports in Dolphins ‘know each other’s names’ that DOLPHINS may be even closer to humans than previously realised, with new research showing they communicate by whistling out their own “names”.

Research in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicates that there is only a 50/50 chance of an email recipient correctly interpreting the tone of an email.

Richard Cross describes how new research is revealing how biological foraging strategies can be adapted to help users search out and find information more effectively on the web.

If you want to play with PC-based simulations which introduce key bioteams concepts then its worth a visit to the MIT Starlogo site where under the PROJECTS section you can simulate the behaviour of bees, fireflies, slime, termites, rabbits, ants and boids (birdoids).

In the 6th European Framework Programme, 23 research and supporting projects have been selected (so far) to support leadership in the field of networked businesses. These projects fall into four main topic areas or "clusters":

The Center for Biologically-Inspired Design at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have announced a conference in Biologically Inspired Design in Science and Engineering on May 10-12.

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.

According to research by UPS Europe Business Monitor involving a survey of around 1500 business leaders from Europe’s top 15,000 companies organisations are developing more support for policies to help women attain more senior positions.