Social Origin of Good Ideas

by mikekarnj on November 7, 2008

This is so genius..

“Ronald Burt, who created the ‘social holes’ network measure (find out where the connections between groups aren’t, and look for value in bridging, roughly), wrote a paper last year on the Social Origin of Good Ideas
A theme in the above work is that information, beliefs and behaviors are more homogenous within than between groups. People focus on activities inside their own group, which creates holes in the information flow of information across structural holes. People with contacts in separate groups broker the flow of information across structural holes. Brokerage is social capital in that brokers have a competitive advantage in creating value with projects that integrate otherwise separate ways of thinking or behaving.” – Clay Shirky

This paper is about social structure defining an advantage in creating good ideas, and people reproducing the social structure as they discuss their ideas. The hypothesis is that people who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas.

Ronald Burt pointed out the importance of “structural holes” — those nodes (people) that connect networks. If I know person A and person B and person A and B ought to know each other, but don’t, I am occupying a “structural hole” in their intersecting social networks, and making that introduction could create social capital [...]

Download the entire research paper by Ronald Burt here

  • http://exitcreative.net/blog/ Clay Parker Jones

    Am reading this paper now… it’s amazing.

    I also liked the part in there on how scientific ideas happen when people are young, typically, and people that have the ideas don’t convince older people that the ideas are right, they just have to wait until the older people to die before the ideas are accepted. Funny, that.

    I was reading in a book today, Extraordinary Origins of Ordinary Things that the word Pontiff comes from the latin Pontifex (or something similar), which, if you’ve ever been to France, means bridge-builder. I suppose it’s not such a bad thing to pontificate, after all.

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