Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, MIT Center For Collective Intelligence 03-19-09 Interview Transcription

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Interview and transcription March 19, 2009
Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, Center for Collective Intelligence
COINS – Collaborative Innovation Networks
Q: What are you most passionate about? A: COINS!

Collaborative Innovation Networks!
Hello, I’m Peter Gloor and I’m a Research scientist at the MIT Center
for Collective Intelligence and my big passion is COINS -
Collaborative Innovation Networks – and that is something I have
been fascinated with for a very long time. I was in industry for ten
years as a Manager for two big consulting firms and what I found was
that much more than technology what really matters is people and
new ideas. And what I found is that if I was working with like-minded
people in those COINS – Collaborative Innovation Networks - that
was the time I was energized the most and it really was the best thing
to really create new ideas; you work to solve any big problems of the
world. So, that is the really big thing, those COINS that I have been
studying for the last six years or so.
Q: What would you like people to know, think, feel and do?
A: Work Together!
[00:01:20] So what would I like people to know, and think, and feel? I
think it’s about working together, about getting an understanding,
Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 1
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open Economic
Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Fl Cleveland, Ohio 44103 USA
2
about being all members of a swarm and these COINS – these

Collaborative Innovation Networks – for me, they are the main
building blocks of those self-organizing groups of people that I call the
swarms. I have stumbled on this idea of the swarm by chance when I
was in Paris with my children and we were looking for restaurants
and on the first day we ended up on top of Monte Martre, which is the
place where all the tourists go so what we did at that time was we did
not follow the swarm we followed the crowd. The food was okay and
there were tons of tourists. Next day we went to the concierge in the
hotel and we asked his advice and we got good food at a very high
price, so that was asking the ‘expert.’ The last day we followed the
swarm, which means we followed the ‘locals’ and we got by far the
very best food at a very decent price. So, this concept of the swarm
and swarm creativity that is something that I think everybody should
be aware of and being part of the swarm that makes us feeling good
and it’s just this unbelievably energizing group or part or feeling or
thing where we believe we can change the world. There are so many
applications of this swarm creativity and that starts by just instead of
running a project as a conventional project, if you run it as a self-
organizing swarm, you will get much better results. I have a very
simple rule in that regard and it means do not pay people in the
beginning, just advertise what you want to do and then hopefully you
will find some people, they might join you and some might leave you
but overall you get better results, you get the people who care, you
have much more fun doing it, and you get unbelievable results. I have
seen that, for example in building our own software, it was a slow
process, I went through many graduate students, but what we got in
the end was, it’s a great product and it actually analyzes swarms.
Swarm Creativity is...working together & being part of one world
[00:04:06] I will go on a little bit about the aspect of what creative

swarms can do and what we are, how we are putting it to productive
use and one thing that the swarms do is they express themselves in
blogs and on landforms and so on, and if we look at what they say we
assume they “put their money where their mouth is” or to phrase it
differently “they will do tomorrow what they say today “ or to phrase it
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even more differently, we can predict what’s going to happen

tomorrow by reading the collective mind of today and that’s a project
we are doing right now and we call that ‘collective prediction’ and one
thing we did and its of course easy to say that today is predicting the
success of Barack Obama. The point is we compared what people
were saying on blogs, like Huffington Post and so on, more than 18
months ago, and sadly Hillary Clinton had always very low buzz and
Barack, he was able to raise incredible excitement there and that
predicted very well what happened. But you can also apply the same
thing for much more straightforward things like what movie will be
successful at the box office because people walk with their feet so
they say “I’m going to see that movie” and if we look at online forums
like for example, the Internet movie database, there we have the
people that are passionate movie goers talking about what they
would like to see that will predict where they will go tomorrow. So, it’s
a very fancy way of reading the mind of the swarm and predicting
what people are doing tomorrow. The same thing we can also do if
we look at e-mail communication inside companies, the same thing
we do if we look at interaction networks through social badges which
are those things that people wear around their necks and we can
then put that to use for example by finding the most creative
individuals, we can help groups of people or individuals be more
creative based on their interaction patterns and the goal is to always
empower the individual to form a self-organizing swarm by exposing
those patterns of interaction, the positive patterns of interactions and
this allows us to predict which are the most creative teams and how
we can make teams more creative. We have done projects for
example between Japanese and American researchers and we
measured how they communicate with each other and what we found
is that in the beginning we represented every researcher as a big
circle and the size of the circle was how active somebody was and
the color of the circle was how much other people paid attention to
what the person was saying. And in the beginning we had three or
four very white circles and some small green circles. Now you might
wonder which was the Japanese and which ones were the Americans
– I think you might guess how it was – but the point is we showed
those circles to the researchers every evening, what we got in the
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end was a very well balanced group of somewhat introvert Japanese

that were saying much more and extrovert Americans who were
saying too much in the beginning, but in the end, all of them, and very
quickly, became very engaged active collaborators, so this is a great
system of increasing group creativity and making everybody a much
better creative person. I think that is perhaps enough for now.
Q: What category of the Innovation Framework do you invest

your time and attention?
[00:08:11] Okay, so the Innovation Framework that I think is the most

interesting is not surprisingly the COIN Collaborative Innovation
Networks Framework which we have been developing which consists
of the COIN in the core which has a larger concentric circle around it
of people which are in the learning network, collaborative learning
network, and then an even bigger network around which is the
Collaborative Interest Network. It works extremely well for example if
we look at Open Source programmers where if you take the example
of the creation of either Linux or the World Wide Web we have the
initial group of people that could be Linus Torvald for Linux or Tim
Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web. He gets this five to ten people
to collaborate, he doesn’t pay them, they are very intrinsically
motivated and they create a great system that in due course changes
the world and they attract other people that learn about those ideas
the Collaborative Learning Network and then even more people get
attracted and that’s usually when the financial element comes in for
the Collaborative Interest Network. So, this is in my view a never-
ending engine of innovation. And if we look at Open Source that’s a
great example and open innovation is not a framework that fits in very
well so to address the question of, “How would I like to link it?” I think
I would look at how to combine the COIN framework with open
innovation with Open Source innovation as the bigger idea that’s
certainly one thing that is for me very crucial. Now, on a more
personal side, also what interests me very much is how can we take
our ideas and also get some immediate economic impact or to phrase
it differently, we have taken our ideas and we have created a start-up
which we call galaxy advisors, which means we help people not to be
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stars but be galaxies, don’t be a star, be a galaxy, connecting other

people which means take our software and find the networks that is
very similar to what Valdis Krebs is doing with his Orgnet and InFlow
system and we are trying to do the similar things by finding those
galactic networks, galaxy people, of the web for example, or email
and then trying to help them be more creative. On the one hand we
do that as researchers and the other hand we have our software and
this has now already been used by quite a few companies trying to do
the same thing. Now I have to say its really the company’s that
wouldn’t need it are the most open to those ideas because they might
already be organized as little galaxies or they have some level of
open source innovation, or open innovation but still what we found is
that by giving people a virtual mirror that mirrors back how people
communicate that’s a great way of creating more innovation and
making people more open. Very similar to the example I was
describing before of the microscopic level where you have the social
badges and you have the people in the beginning who only talk
nobody listens to them and the other ones who don’t dare to speak
out and by exposing that, mirroring that back, we get in the end a
much more innovative organization.
Q: How does your work affect global sustainability?
[00:12:12] I think those theories of COINS Collaborative Innovation

Networks have great applicability to address those big questions that
concern mankind right now. Like, global warming, climate change,
getting a more sustainable environment, because what we need are
those intrinsically motivated people who want to do things not to paid
but to solve the problem. I have been involved as an advisor and
active member of communities. We have an initiative right here at the
Center for Collective Intelligence on climate change where we are
trying to form those communities, we have been very fortunate to find
some people some local support here in the Boston communities,
some founders of some big companies have been supporting us
and… now it has spread out …we are trying to connect communities
with these around the world and obviously having a good brand like
MIT behind helps somewhat so I mean having the best people, its
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still, you need that platform to carry out the message and this is a
great place for doing it.
Q: What areas of research interest you and why?
[00:13:33] So my research areas are sort of have been evolved over

the last thirty years, I was trained as a mathematician, then my PhD
was in computer science, then I became a natural scientist and these
days I am shifting more and more toward sociology and psychology
so I am probably just this weird guy who is connecting many different
fields or as we call that in social network analysis which is perhaps
the best description today of my research field, ‘ bridging structural
holes’ or being a gate keeper between many different fields so that is
the sort of my main area and I am very happy that I already get
through this interview today some better connection to Valdis Krebs a
guy who I always love interacting with, there are of course many
others, we had a brief discussion about Jared Diamond I admire I
don’t know if there is ever a chance of meeting him or some other
psychologists that for example study energy and how people
exchange energy and what energizes us in becoming more creative.
There is great creativity research, there is a fellow I have a hard time
pronouncing his name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I don’t know if you
have stumbled on it, that has been sort of an inspiration to me so,
what I try to do is to very much step on the shoulders of giants, and if
there is a chance of talking to someone or living giants even better.
To be an innovator or having, I try to be coming up with new ideas the
best way is to talk to people who are smarter than myself, learn from
them and mix together their ideas and try to steal the best for myself
so interacting with other smart people and that can be physicist,
because they have studied lots of networks, that can be
psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that I just mentioned and
combining their ideas, I think that is what drives me.
Q: What networks are you building? How? Why?
[00:16:04] Network building is in fact one of my favorite activities and

I am just coming back from the Sunbelt Conference which is the
7
annual gathering of researchers on social network analysis and they

have something, a great institution, which they call the ‘Hospitality
Suite’ in the evening which basically means you can drink as much as
you want and you just talk to each other, its great for building
networks, but that is a very informal process, and diversity, and
randomness, serendipity, those are all essential ingredients for
network building, but one can still try to put it on a somewhat more
systematic footing, and I call that process ‘Cool Farming’ – create or
farm cool trends and we have our own COIN which we call COIN2 or
COIN on COINS, Collaborative Innovation Network on other COINS
and it is basically a group of researchers in Helsinki, in Germany, in
Italy, and about five places in the U.S. and we have some people in
Savannah, we have people at Wayne State University, we have
people in Berkeley, and we have people in the Boston area, we have
people at Dartmouth, and we get together virtually, we meet at places
like Hospitality Suite at Sunbelt, we go and have beer together, but
we also work very hard to produce papers together, we even
sometimes do an occasional start-up together to commercialize some
of those ideas because my experience is that every successful start-
up in the beginning is a COIN because you have an idea, you do care
more about the idea than making money and then you get the next
Google. That’s if you take your – that’s my heretical view your spelled
out business plan where you have to follow my quarterly report after
quarterly report it doesn’t work. But putting together smart brains and
a great vision that’s a much better recipe and that’s what we do with
network building.
Q: What enterprise opportunities do you see?
[00:18:33] So, what are the next networking, enterprise opportunities

that I see in my context? I think Web 2.0, social networking software,
that’s in my area of expertise, a really hot area. I lived through e-
Business Bubble 1.0. At that time I was the e-Business practice
leader for Deloitte consulting in Europe and it was the one time where
we had more work than we could ever deliver and I don’t think that
time will ever return, the Golden Years. But for right now for social
networking software and trying to help people connect, trying to help
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people come up with new ideas and trying to tell what happens
tomorrow. Even in those very difficult times right now we are very
active in doing it we have just started our start-up galaxy advisors and
together with seven students out of which five are full time in the
start-up, we are marketing out social networking software, we give it
away for free to academic institutions just because we think we
should share what we have gotten with others too and also this is a
great way of getting wonderful people, highly talented people,
intrinsically motivated people, applying all the principles I was talking
about and getting the ones that care about the ideas and not the
ones that want to get the high salary from day one works extremely
well for us. I have also been involved in a course teaching for the last
four years at Helsinki, Germany, Savannah, southern Italy, and MIT
and its about creating student COINS using our software, analyzing
real organizations, communication network and online community
communication networks and this has already turned out into
incubating two or three companies that those virtual student teams
which had Finns, and Italians and Germans and Americans all
collaborating and they hadn’t met face to face. I have taken some of
them now to San Diego to the Sunbelt Conference where they met for
the first time face to face, great experience, and some of them have
now started their own business ventures in that field and we have
started ours, so again it’s trying to apply the same ideas of those
COINS and growing them to bigger ecosystem and doing Cool
Farming of these cool ideas works extremely well.
Q: Describe your work as a collaborative leader
[00:21:25] Okay, so perhaps combining the question of sustainability

and participative leadership, or collaborative leadership, I have been
involved in trying to get the Internet and the computer to the
developing world. We have a project, and a Foundation that collects
used computers here and brings them to Africa. I was in Kenya, I was
in Ghana, and I was trying to get computers to classrooms. It’s
different from the One Laptop Per Child, Nicholas Negroponte – it’s
much more modest, we get just used computers that people don’t
want anymore, we check that they work and then we get them to the
9
classroom and this is an absolutely collaborative experience on our

side. What we found is that it’s not so easy in the Third World it still
seems that sometimes there needs to be a hierarchical leader
otherwise things don’t work, but overall, I think on our side it only
works if you get a group of people that all care about the idea, and
obviously there is no money to pay anybody anyway because you
want to put everything into a, invest all the resources you have into
collecting computers and getting them over there, and again, for me,
it was another great learning experience of the COIN model and in
fact, even in Ghana, getting the community engaged, getting the
school children, I was really impressed, we had the teachers and they
couldn’t really, they didn’t know what to do with the computers and
then we had the twelve to sixteen year olds and they have probably
been in an Internet café once or twice, and so they just came and
they unpacked the computers after two hours we had everything
connected and they were already sitting behind the computers and
using them. It was very impressive, self-organization and this little
COINS they are learning from each other: one guy figured out how to
connect the cables and then the others took it up and it just worked -
a great experience.
Q: What has inspired your work today?
[00:23:38] So, the main inspiration for this Swarm Creativity

framework, principle and the way those COINS Collaborative
Innovation Networks operate, are the Bees. I was exposed to Bees
very early on because my Father was, and still is, a very active Bee
keeper so I grew up with Bees and he admired them for his entire life
and so he sort of instilled that into me also and the more I studied
how those COINS and human beings interoperate, the more I found
we really can be inspired by the Bees and you know a Bee queen
never orders any Bee to do something, the Bee just knows it because
they share the same DNA and for me the way how COINS work
together is precisely the same. You have a share set of values, and
you have initially some Bee queen or you might have a group of
Queens and that’s probably different because as you know in the Bee
hive the Queens kill each other they only let one Queen be the
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Queen at one time otherwise the hive splits or you have the fight.
There are some parallels to that also in Open Source there are some
very highly publicized fights where for example in this Apache open
source group you got some leadership changes fairly quickly so again
the pattern of the Bees applies, but overall, COINS and Bees are
unbelievably well in adopting to external change, being very flexible
and just do unbelievable things in creating new hives, honey combs,
collecting honey and finding new locations. Actually, the ‘finding new
locations’ process, for me that’s a great metaphor for how we get new
ideas, because we have the Bee Queen taking off with half of the
swarm towards a new direction and that’s the same if you have new
ideas, and then what we have is we have the scouts, the Bee scouts,
that look for greener pastures that go out and we have the same thing
for the COINS, we have this first group of scouts and they are the
initial COIN and then they come back to the swarm, they report on
those new ideas, and then we have the Bee swarm, as you know, the
Bee queen takes this swarm, they fly to an intermediate place where
they form this cluster and then the scouts come back and they do the
Bagel dance where they tell about the new location, and in the COIN
you have the same. You have people doing the Bagel dance. That’s
the only way how I try to recruit people, by doing the Bagel dance, so
I tell, like right now, I just tell about new ideas and that builds up the
heat in the swarm and at some point, in the cluster of the Bees, the
scouts change from the Bagel dancing to just building up the heat.
Which means in the Bee cluster that happens by piping at each other
and so the sound goes up, the heat goes up in the cluster and the
same for COINS. The heat goes up and suddenly the cluster
explodes and that’s when the idea gets over the tipping point. The
cluster explodes, the Bees go out and they change the world with the
new idea and that’s the same for COINS.
With our generous thanks to Peter Gloor

The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open)
4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Floor Cleveland Ohio 44103 USA
Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative
Works 3.0 United States

11
Related Interviews
o Introduction - Swarm Creativity: At the heart of it all [00:08:18]

You Tube, Vimeo, Livestream
o Swarm Creativity: Working together and being part of One
World [00:28:00] Vimeo, Livestream
Biographical Information
o Biographical information http://cci.mit.edu/pgloor/
Research
o http://www.ickn.org/
o http://www.ickn.org/html/ckn_publications.htm
Company
o Galaxy Advisors http://www.galaxyadvisors.com
Website and Blog
o Swarm Creativity website http://www.swarmcreativity.net/

o Swarm Creativity blog http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/
Books and Publications
"Swarm Creativity - Competitive Advantage through Collaborative

Innovation Networks" http://www.amazon.com/Swarm-Creativity-
Competitive-Collaborative-Innovation/dp/0195304128
"Coolhunting - Chasing Down The Next Big Thing"

http://www.amazon.com/Coolhunting-Chasing-Down-Next-
Thing/dp/0814473865/ref=pd_sim_b_1
Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea Into the Next Big Thing
http://www.amazon.com/Coolfarming-Turn-Your-Great-
12
Thing/dp/0814413862/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=12812899
60&sr=1-1
Contact Information
Peter A. Gloor
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Cambridge MA
pgloor@mit.edu
+1 617 253 7018(o)
+1 617 512 6556 (m)


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Interview and transcription March 19, 2009

Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of

COINS – Collaborative Innovation Networks

Q: What are you most passionate about? A: COINS!

about being all members of a swarm and these COINS – these

Swarm Creativity is...working together & being part of one world

[00:04:06] I will go on a little bit about the aspect of what creative

even more differently, we can predict what’s going to happen

end was a very well balanced group of somewhat introvert Japanese

Q: What category of the Innovation Framework do you invest

[00:08:11] Okay, so the Innovation Framework that I think is the most

stars but be galaxies, don’t be a star, be a galaxy, connecting other

Q: How does your work affect global sustainability?

[00:12:12] I think those theories of COINS Collaborative Innovation

Q: What areas of research interest you and why?

[00:13:33] So my research areas are sort of have been evolved over

Q: What networks are you building? How? Why?

[00:16:04] Network building is in fact one of my favorite activities and

annual gathering of researchers on social network analysis and they

Q: What enterprise opportunities do you see?

[00:18:33] So, what are the next networking, enterprise opportunities

Q: Describe your work as a collaborative leader

[00:21:25] Okay, so perhaps combining the question of sustainability

classroom and this is an absolutely collaborative experience on our

Q: What has inspired your work today?

[00:23:38] So, the main inspiration for this Swarm Creativity

With our generous thanks to Peter Gloor

Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 10

o Introduction - Swarm Creativity: At the heart of it all [00:08:18]

o Biographical information http://cci.mit.edu/pgloor/

o Galaxy Advisors http://www.galaxyadvisors.com

Website and Blog

o Swarm Creativity website http://www.swarmcreativity.net/

Books and Publications

"Swarm Creativity - Competitive Advantage through Collaborative

"Coolhunting - Chasing Down The Next Big Thing"

Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 12

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