How social networks lead to innovation

"Technology has expanded our ability to communicate across geographic and social distance. "Global" is the word of the day. The limited scale of yesterday's organisations is today inefficient. We've removed layers of bureaucracy and laid in fast, flexible communication systems.

Leaders of large organisations inevitably talk about people and cultural issues when asked to describe the most difficult barriers to managing and co-ordinating communications.

We are capable of co-ordinating across scattered markets of human endeavour, but we are not yet competent in how to take advantage of this capability. This is because we continue to work in organisation silos and in the way we learned in long-established organisations."
(Ron Burt, 17 February 2008)

[Professor Ron Burt argues that social networks spanning the gaps in our existing social structure are key to innovation, and personal and commercial success.]