Collaborative Innovation Through Swarm Creativity

It is an odd word, not one that you’ll find in the parlance of most organizations, business or otherwise. But the idea of “swarm,” especially in the context of creativity promises to become more and more familiar to those seeking to stay on the cutting edge of innovation in the new century.
In July 2003, Boston experienced the power of swarming. Flash mobs had burst into applause on the mezzanine of New York’s Grand Hyatt, and they had whirled like dervishes in San Francisco. On Thursday, July 31, 2003, they also struck in Boston. As Harvard bookstore employees watched, a few hundred people crowded into the greeting-card section, holding instructions on what to say and how to act. They were looking for a card for their friend Bill. He lives in New York. Ten minutes later, the mob broke into applause, and then dispersed. “Bill from New York” is credited with creating flash mobs. The gatherings are coordinated through Web sites and chain e-mails, with the point of being pointless. While the first flash mobs strove to stay silly, they have grown in the meantime from an Internet curiosity to becoming an increasingly widespread part of modern Web society.
Even politicians like 2004 early US democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean have been drawn into the flash mob phenomenon to organize their political campaigns. Mr. Dean heavily relied on the Web to mobilize his grassroots supporters, to collect campaign money, and to fine-tune his political message through collecting direct feedback from supporters on his Weblog. Final 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry continued when Howard Dean dropped out, collecting a large part of his over $300 million campaign donations by grassroots support over his Web site. The Kerry campaign had learned the lesson from Dean.
Irrespective of what you might have thought of Dean’s politics, no one can deny the power unleashed by his campaign’s “swarm.”
Why should this matter to business executives?

Swarm Intelligence for Social Insects
Flash mobs are striking examples of how the Internet can be tapped to coordinate “swarming” behavior, a concept popularized by computer scientist Eric Bonabeau. Having studied the amazing world of swarm intelligence, the collective intelligence of social insect colonies, Bonabeau is now applying his insights to human interactions and computer technology.
Individually, one insect may not be capable of much; collectively, social insects are capable of achieving great things. They build and defend nests, forage for food, take care of the brood, divide labor, form bridges, and much more. Look at a single ant, and you might think not think it is behaving in synchrony with the rest of the colony. But we sometimes observe “ant highways” – impressive columns of ants that can run from tens to hundreds of meters. They are highly coordinated forms of collective behavior.
Swarm intelligence in social insects is based on self-organization; no one is in charge, but social insects successfully solve complex tasks.

According to Bonabeau, self-organization has four properties :
1. Positive feedback reinforces desired behavior, such as when a bee recruits other bees to help her exploit a food source.
2. Negative feedback counterbalances positive feedback, such as when bees overcrowd a food source, which stops them exploring it.
3. Amplification of randomness leads to positive reinforcement, such as when bees that get lost trying to locate a known food source discover new food sources.
4. Amplification of interactivity has a positive outcome, that is, when insects make positive use of the results of their own activities as well as those from the activities of other insects.

Social insects combine these four properties into predefined patterns, which have evolved over time, to accomplish efficiently a given task. For example, colonies of ants can collectively find the nearest and richest food source even if no individual ant knows its location.
Errors and randomness contribute very strongly to the success of social insects by enabling them to discover, explore, and exploit. Errors feed self-organization, creating flexibility so that the colony can adapt to a changing environment with robustness, ensuring that even when one or more individuals fail the group can still perform its tasks.
Bonabeau reasons that our world is becoming so complex that it cannot be comprehended by any single human being. Swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing “intelligent” systems in which autonomy, emergence, and distributedness replace control, preprogramming, and centralization. During most of our history we human beings have suffered from a “centralized mindset”: we like to assign the coordination of activities to a central command. The self-organization of social insects, through direct and indirect interactions, is a very different way of performing complex tasks – and it closely resembles the behavior of COIN team members.
Open source developers, for instance, exhibit behavioral patterns similar to an ant colony. While the behavior of the individual programmer might appear random, open source developers are – like ants – self-organized to build impressive software systems, directed by lead developers such as Linus Torvalds (the “ant queen”), who impress their distinctive brand and flavor on their “colony” of software developers.
The crucial point here is that in social insect colonies, as in COINs, there is no individual giving marching orders. Neither the ant queen nor the lead developer of an open source team directs the individual behavior of the individual.
The obvious advantages in accomplishing complex tasks through swarm intelligence include no central control, errors being okay, flexibility, robustness, and self-repair. If a decentralized, self-organizing system takes over, though, how should the individual behave so that the network performs appropriately at the system-wide level? It is difficult for conventional managers to accept the idea that solutions are emergent rather than predefined and preprogrammed. Most managers would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than with a solution they do not fully understand or control. The attitude of many managers to COINs reflects this view; managers resent giving up control in exchange for self-organization, increased agility, and flexibility of their organization.

Watched individually, members of a COIN may appear like individual ants to behave erratically. But like an ant colony, the entire COIN operates as a highly efficient self-organizing community. They communicate in patterns structured as small world and scale-free networks (which we will learn about in more detail in a later chapter). They share a common code of ethics that forms a sort of collaborative bond based on similar expertise and shared goals. In the appendices, we will see how to make use of the e-mail “pheromone” trail of COIN members (like the chemical trail ants use to communicate and collaborate) to spot COINs and to optimize their performance.
The lessons learned from the amazing world of swarm intelligence of social insects also apply to how members of Collaborative Innovation Networks innovate. The ant or bee queen is not served because she orders her insects to do so, but because evolution has taught the insects that protection of the queen means protection of their gene pool for survival. The same is true for the people working together in a COIN. People working with the innovator are not working for her or him because they have been ordered to do so, but because they want the innovation to succeed. They all share the same vision and goals (in a sense, the same “genes”); they want to succeed and see their innovation spread and be accepted by the outside world.

What is Swarm Creativity?
Perhaps nothing expresses the main motivation for swarm creativity better than something I read on a napkin in a San Francisco restaurant.

If you and I swap a dollar, you and I still each have a dollar. If you and I swap an idea, you and I have two ideas each.

By openly sharing ideas and work, a team’s creative output is exponentially more than the sum of the creative outputs of all the individual team members. While swarm intelligence is based on equal sharing of information, swarm creativity is founded on the open sharing of ideas. COIN members share their common vision, they share all their findings and results of their common work, and they also share the credit for the results of their work. COINs collaborating in swarm creativity can achieve awesome results.
One of the most amazing examples of swarm creativity I know of is a virtual collaboration among three jazz composers and musicians, who play together at the same location but composes and records in parallel the same piece by coordinating over the Internet. Without ever getting together physically, they jointly composed and recorded an opera – Popes.
The three composers – David Hoenigsberg, Douglas Grannell, and Gareth Dylan Smith – succeeded in this team effort having met several years ago and spent considerable time playing and improvising together. They discovered their mutual compatibility. They shared common behavioral and musical patterns, a joint way to tackle a musical task, or as David calls it, a “common sound world.” This is familiar for accomplished jazz musicians, who get together to play for hours on end without written melodies, operating as a perfect team, where a theme is taken up and passed from one instrument to the other, with team members switching from playing in the background to getting the solo part.
David, Douglas, and Gareth extended the same concept into the cyberworld, virtually improvising together over long distance when they in parallel composed their joint opera. The three of them were immersed into the same virtual world, collaborating as mutually aligned musicians, using the same musical and behavioral patterns. They produced an end product where the sum is larger than its parts, and that none of them could have done individually. In creating Popes, these three composers provide a perfect blueprint for a self-organizing creative team, which is innovating together, and collaborating by sharing a common behavioral code.
Notable is that none of the three composers were paid to do their work. They could not expect any immediate financial reward. They could not even expect immediate fame. Their style of music is appreciated only by a relatively small group of dedicated lovers of modernist classical harmonic music. Nevertheless, they all shared the same musical goal, and they were a highly motivated team that overcame considerable obstacles in creating their opera.
Swarm creativity needs enough leeway to flower. Team members want a risk free work environment, where they get mutual emotional support. Gareth, Douglas, and David work together as a team of equals characterized by high mutual respect for each other’s capabilities. When I interviewed them (individually), each spoke of the others with the greatest respect and tolerance for their strength and weaknesses. Their relationship is based on a high level of trust, which has been built up over the years of playing together. The success of the long-distance Popes collaboration strengthened that trust.
Team members withhold no information. The free flow of ideas and thoughts is essential to the success of creative teams. While David, Douglas, and Gareth have a clear split of musical responsibilities, with a clear picture of which components each will compose, they stay in close contact. They exchange e-mails and phone calls frequently, bouncing inspirations and melodies back and forth and gauging the reactions to new ideas. This is not a process where there is always unanimous agreement. Rather, disagreements are raised openly and discussed. From this conflict, new creative inspirations arise.
This composer team has no external coordinators. It is entirely self-organizing and self-selecting. Roles and responsibilities of each member are clear to all, with no need for lengthy coordination meetings. There is no officially appointed leader, and David has assumed a coordinating role only because, in his words, he “sort of naturally” inherited the function. He sees himself not as an authoritative boss, but as a servant of his team who does his best to help each team member succeed in his chosen task.
The Popes project illustrates excellently the various facets of swarm creativity. But it is only a three-person innovation team. There are COINs with tens of thousands of members engaged in swarm creativity. An ideal example is Wikipedia: it is the ongoing result of the creative output of more than 100,000 volunteer authors and editors.

Wikipedia – Swarm Creativity Thriving Online
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, thrives on swarm creativity. It is the collaborative, non-profit competitor to commercial online encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica.
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger, a philosophy lecturer at Ohio State University, and Jimmy Wales, an Internet entrepreneur. While Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica are maintained by a staff of paid journalists, researchers and scientists, Wikipedia’s more than 400,000 entries are updated by thousands of volunteers. Wikipedia makes no distinction between authors and readers; any reader can change an encyclopedia entry at any time. The current directory of Wikipedians, as the volunteer contributors call themselves, lists more 100,000 names, extended by an unknown number of anonymous authors.
Wikipedia entries are surprisingly accurate and complete, because they can be corrected and updated. Authors are asked to maintain a neutral viewpoint (as well as “to be bold but stay cool” and “be nice to newcomers”) to keep the contents objective, and a small group of trusted regular authors and editors are appointed as administrators because not everyone obeys. The strongest measure of censorship is that this group can temporarily turn off editing of an entry for the rest of the world.
Wikipedia has worked remarkably well so far based on a policy of nearly complete freedom to edit. The Wikiquette asks each Wikipedian to treat her or his fellow community members respectfully. Wikipedia is entirely transparent in how text for controversial entries is fought over by different factions in the maintainer team. A log for each entry tracks the change history. Each entry also has a separate discussion page, where disagreeing authors are asked to engage in a polite dialogue and where people should be prepared to apologize. An important part of the Wikiquette describes how to give praise when praise is due by making friendly entries on a user’s page, by listing work under the category “great editing in progress,” and by nominating entries as the day’s “featured article”.
Wikipedia is not the only Collaborative Innovation Network sharing the fruits of its collaborative endeavors at not cost. The open source movement is the best example of a network of COINs, which innovate in swarm intelligence by contributing their intellectual property to the world and give away their software source code for free.

Open Source Software – The Advantage of Swarm Creativity
One of the most compelling arguments for operating in swarm creativity is the astonishing rise of the Linux operating system. Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds was certainly unaware when he began his term project to develop a UNIX-based operating system for the PC that Linux would become – in just a little over 10 years – the main competitor to Microsoft’s dominance of the small server and desktop operating system market. The search engine giant Google uses Linux to power its farm of thousands of Web servers.
Linux has become the most popular alternative OS to Windows not only because it available for free, but also because anybody can make changes to it. The entire source code of Linux is publicly available, and anyone adept at the C programming language can extend the code. Torvalds asks only that improvements to Linux be shared; he and a group of volunteers check them and integrate the best into future versions of Linux.
What Torvalds created is open source software, which comes in many flavors but shares certain characteristics. One is that the source code – the underlying instructions that determine how a program operates – is public, so users can tamper with it; another is that new code is usually contributed by volunteers. So far, most open source projects are concentrated in areas of infrastructure software – the code that runs the core activities of a computer or a network. This extends from the basic operating system to the middleware layers of software needed to run particular applications.
The success of open source software projects illustrates the power of COINs and relate directly to some of the benefits introduced in Chapter 1. Key to the success of Linux, for instance, has been total transparency and a set of consistent rules among the thousands of programmers involved. Advocates of open source also claim – with considerable justification – that their software is of a higher quality. Because there are some many users and developers of open source software products, bugs or software glitches are “deep” – that is, hard to find. This has been verified by several research groups.
In the case of closed source software, users usually update only after software programmers have fixed reported bugs. A new version is available only after discrete periods of time, during which private programmers work to fix the last batch of faults. For open source software, this feedback and updating happens continuously. Open source software has a faster development and fix cycle compared to proprietary systems, and also benefits from more user feedback. The same factors also help open source software to develop stronger security protection, making open source software more secure than proprietary software.
The conclusion: open source software is developed faster, better, more secure, and at lower cost than closed source software. Teams of open source software developers operate as near-ideal COINs coordinating their creative efforts through swarm intelligence, and their products are at least as good as what is produced by conventional closed source programmer teams in conventional companies. At the same time, open source programmers also operate as a meritocracy, where the intellectual and emotional capabilities of individuals define their position in the open source development community.
IBM is one company that has discovered the advantages of Collaborative Innovation Networks in combination with open source. The computer giant has invested more than $60 million into the open source toolset Eclipse, which has become the leading Java software development environment, attracting hundreds of vendors and millions of users. In fact, growth and adoption of Eclipse have been so rapid that companies such as Ericsson are evaluating it as a single, corporate-wide development platform to cut costs and boost efficiency.
In the beginning of 2004, IBM totally released its control over Eclipse and turned it over to an independent foundation. IBM gets to appoint just one of 10 members of the foundation’s board of directors, but continues to invest substantially in Eclipse by employing more than fifty of the Eclipse core developers with “committer” status – that is, people who form the innermost core of the Eclipse open source developer community, owning the rights to make changes directly to the source code.
Why does IBM invest in Eclipse under an open source license? I met with Erich Gamma, one of the lead developers of Eclipse, in his IBM office in Switzerland. First, he told me that IBM recognized that it cannot build all the software tools itself, and needed a platform that helps integrate different tools so that partners can contribute and extend the toolset. Obviously, such a platform also helps IBM align its internal tooling efforts. Having a widely used software platform distributed under an open source license guarantees high quality, because it is tested and maintained by millions of programmers who discover, report, and fix bugs continuously. Second, IBM sells complementary software tools that are based on Eclipse, and having Eclipse available for free on almost any platform it a huge potential customer base for these tools. Third, IBM reaps lots of fame, goodwill, and what Erich calls the “cool factor” by being seen as a significant contributor of the best Java development environment to the public domain. And IBM is using Eclipse to develop some of its own commercial software packages, such as Lotus Workplace.
The Eclipse project provides a prime example of a Collaborative Innovation Network that has had a stellar success based on principles of meritocracy, transparency, and openness, garnering numerous awards as the best Java product and Java development tool. Even more important, users have cast their vote, downloading the Eclipse tool more than 18 million times since its inception.
Intrinsically motivated (see Sidebar 2b) and self-organizing into different roles of work, open source developers perfectly demonstrate the advantages of swarm intelligence. They produce results of superior quality at much lower cost than do commercial software developers. Working to develop new innovative products by massive collaborative creativity, they are powered by the self-organizing tenets of swarm intelligence: reinforcement of positive and negative feedback, and amplification of randomness and interactivity. It’s a power that businesses can harness by supporting COINs.

More Examples of Swarm Creativity
I experienced swarm creativity firsthand when we created the Interoperability Service Interface (ISI) for Union Bank of Switzerland. We started out using public domain software. The project was running on a shoestring budget, driven by the dedication and the commitment of the team members. Our team had complimentary talents, combining programming, system architecture, database, algorithms, management, and sales skills. The primary motivation was clearly not financial, but to get the ISI system up and running. Membership was highly self-selecting; after all, while an opportunity to learn about the latest software technologies, it was a high-risk project and a huge technical challenge. Within the team, we worked in a high-trust environment with internal transparency. It was okay to have crazy ideas, which the entire team would discuss. In a few weeks, we were able to build a successful prototype system at very low cost. ISI is still up and running. (The bank’s COIN is described in greater detail in Chapter 5.)
DaimlerChrysler’s e-extended enterprise project, introduced briefly in Chapter 1 (and detailed in Chapter 5), also illustrates the properties and advantages of swarm intelligence in a Collaborative Innovation Network with obvious commercial goals. The project was a product of the e-business economy of the late 1990s, and so merely being part of this new and revolutionary undertaking was highly motivating for project team members. It was an unbelievably exciting feeling to participate in this journey into uncharted territory, at the leading edge of the field, over raging torrents at barely controllable speed. Nobody knew what the next day would bring. Unexpected developments and alliance opportunities popped up constantly. In those spring months of 2000, the entire team worked at 200 percent of its capacity, energized by the vision of its executive vice president, who let the team members take the reins and set the day-to-day directions themselves.
Clearly, the motivation was not opportunities for raises and promotions, but the enjoyment of participating in a total overhaul and a melding together of the procurement processes of Daimler and Chrysler. This excitement was enough to overcome widespread initial skepticism of the management of the procurement and supply departments at both firms involved in the merger. Department heads on both sides of the Atlantic initially were at first reluctant even to share simple information such as the headcount of their business units, but their progressive buy-in into the shared vision of creating something totally new resulted in one unified COIN team. The outside torrent of e-Business also created an environment of creative chaos and uncertainty that greatly increased the readiness of executives to accept change.
The project team worked together as a real collaboration network. Once the initial reluctance to share knowledge was overcome and mutual trust had been developed, information was made transparent to all team members. Although the team was physically split between two locations in Stuttgart and Detroit, team identity was quite strong. Having monthly face-to-face workshops alternately in Germany and the United States helped build a shared identity and a common code of ethics. In those close interactions, strengths and weaknesses of each team member became obvious to the entire team, leading to an open and honest communication style. Team members, regardless of their rank in the company, were not afraid to speak out to the entire group. Complex problems were broken down into tasks and assigned to team members on both sides of the Atlantic. Thanks to a shared common understanding, multifaceted issues such as the development of a new supply chain model or the evaluation of supply chain automation software tools could be solved efficiently by team members working in parallel in both locations.
Membership in the team was self-selecting. Some team members who were initially appointed by senior management pulled out voluntarily, while others who initially were just seconded for a certain presentation or a specific task became increasingly engaged and asked to be officially transferred into the project, subsequently becoming mainstays of the team.
In the end, the e-extended enterprise project became a big success by most measures of project management. Not only were most deliverables on time, but they were also developed efficiently and at reasonable costs. New procurement processes and software solutions were successfully deployed, and the entire project more than paid for itself in the first year of operations. Project team members moved on to assume prominent roles within DaimlerChrysler’s procurement organization or were even chosen for leadership positions with outside firms.
Again, the business success of this project is undisputable: the company spent slightly more than $10 million to optimize its procurement function, and saved more than $50 million in the first year of operation. And it succeeded because of collaborative innovation.

Why Collaborative Innovation is So Powerful
What starts a COIN, and what triggers successful innovation? Is it the phase of the moon, or sheer luck that is responsible for creative inspirations and the breakthrough of groundbreaking new ideas? The crucial point about innovations developed in COINs is that they are open and disruptive.
Harvard professor Clayton Christensen distinguishes between sustaining and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovations do existing things in a novel and better way. For example, Wal-Mart revolutionized mass retailing by using information technologies in a much more massive and better-integrated way than its competitors. It optimized its supply chain by pioneering concepts like vendor managed inventory and automated demand forecasting and replenishment, beating its competitors and becoming the number One Fortune 500 company globally as well as one of the most successful enterprises by many measures. But the “innovation” of Wal-Mart consisted of doing the same things that its competitors did, just “better.” For example, Wal-Mart used available information technologies more thoroughly and consistently than its competitors by being one of the first companies letting its suppliers manage shelf space in Wal-Mart’s own stores. In this sense Wal-Mart still did the same things as its competitors did, only did it do them much more efficiently.
On the other hand, disruptive innovations like the World Wide Web, Linux, the airplane, or the railroad totally changed the way in which something was done. Disruptive innovations are normally conceived outside of established organizations, or if they come out of organizations, they are developed without organizational blessing and are not aligned with the official organizational vision and goals. They have the potential to turn established organizational norms upside down and to redefine the way people work and live.

Academics such as Christensen and Eric von Hippel have analyzed how disruptive innovations succeed. Their main insight is that disruptive innovations rarely make it embedded into large enterprises. While they might initiate within large organizations, they succeed outside of the formal hierarchies of huge enterprises. In fact, the teams that take new inventions outside of the large corporations to start new companies frequently initiate as “stealth” COINs inside large corporations.
In the past, the centrally funded research labs of large corporations were responsible for many disruptive innovations. AT&T Bell Labs, the IBM Research labs, and Xerox PARC produced the transistor, speech recognition, copper chip technology, the scanning tunneling microscope, and the Ethernet; they all fundamentally changed the way a certain product or process operated. But the closed innovation model, in which companies fund these central labs to develop new technology and products, is no longer generally valid. What Harvard professor Henry Chesbrough calls the open innovation model is the new way in which individuals, small companies, and innovation networks create innovations.
The obsolescence of the closed innovation paradigm has been accelerated by different factors. The explosive growth of a large base of skilled, mobile workers has created an auction market that allows startups or entrepreneurs to hire “the best and the brightest” away from larger companies, which threatens the bigger firms’ ability to sustain R&D investment. Between 1980 and 2000, U.S. venture capital skyrocketed from roughly $700 million to over $80 billion. Ready access to this capital, in combination with lucrative stock option packages, attracted many key lab personnel at large companies to startups, eroding the knowledge base of those companies. The availability of venture capital, worker mobility, and global communication means that research employees no longer have to keep their ideas on the shelf while they wait for internal approval to explore them. Instead, they can take off to commercialize those ideas independently. External suppliers are becoming more proficient at delivering products that are just as good if not better than what an internal corporate R&D lab can develop, a trend that levels the playing ground between large firms and their smaller competitors. It allows large firms to bring new products to market faster while also giving smaller rivals the opportunity to overtake larger companies. To take advantage of the changes brought by those factors, companies must move to the open innovation model that leverages the knowledge base of Collaborative Innovation Networks. If they don’t, COIN members will leave and start their businesses elsewhere!
Disruptive “grassroots” innovations by COINs such as the Internet, the Web, and Linux grew out of research labs and universities with little or no organizational blessing and with minimal budgets. The main drivers of these innovations were not the compensation and reward systems of large corporations, but the dedication and commitment of the researchers and innovators. IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and other companies have learned this lesson, and are successfully applying the same principles of open innovation to their own, internal research process. They have intensified collaboration with university researchers and small knowledge companies, and they take new innovations to market much earlier than in the past. A more collaborative culture combined with open communication has led to increased innovation, ultimately resulting in radically new revenue opportunities for companies that embrace the open innovation paradigm.
Open disruptive innovation is not restricted to the high-technology area. For instance, the people spearheading snowboarding are typical open disruptive innovators (see Sidebar 2c). They are pioneers, initially frowned upon by the majority. They are not afraid of riding off-slope, and they are developing their own solutions to manage their journey into new territory until their inventions become an accepted part of daily life.
The commonality between the inventors of snowboarding and high-technology pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee is their combination of capabilities as team players with creative intelligence.
Fritz Bircher, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Applied Sciences of Burgdorf in the Swiss Canton of Bern, is an example of the kind of creator who combines emotional intelligence with creativity and proves an ideal influencer for a COIN. In fact, he is the archetype of a creator, constantly on the lookout for new, interesting applications for his latest invention, the MobileJet – an inexpensive inkjet printer on wheels that can print arbitrarily large areas on almost any surface.
Fritz started the MobileJet project in 2000, when professors at another Swiss vocational college asked one their Burgdorf colleagues for help. Now, as we met, he was getting a call from an investor who was interested in commercializing his invention. But Fritz’s motivation is to design and build new things; making money on his invention is of secondary importance.
Now, Fritz is working with another Burgdorf professor, Reinhold Krause, who is an expert in mechanical engineering. They have assembled a team of about a dozen research assistants to bring their ideas to fruition. Fritz talks constantly about how his team comes up with solutions by working together. In this aspect, he is a typical leader of a Collaborative Innovation Network, where people work together in a meritocratic environment driven by a common vision and common goals, and not for short-term profit. Reinhold and Fritz form the perfect core team of a COIN. Both are driven by high intellectual curiosity, and their motivation to innovate is definitively not financial. By fostering an open collaborative and meritocratic culture, where credit is given to whom credit is due, results are produced not because people are paid to deliver them, but because people care about what they are doing. This leads to a continuous stream of new innovations. For instance, the MobileJet printer is being extended to work as an inexpensive and efficient Braille printer. Reinhold and Fritz are also talking to artists about using the MobileJet to produce large-scale works of art on concrete and tarmac surfaces. These two men have firmly embraced the open innovation model and collaborate and share their results with other innovators at universities and in industry research labs.
Reinhold and Fritz made headlines with another invention a few years back. Their global positioning system-controlled lawnmower, with autopilot, cut the grass to an accuracy of two centimeters. This invention led to a whole list of innovations: building the GPS system into huge combine harvesters; using the same technology in a maintenance robot to measure and maintain Swiss railway tracks; and then adapting the technology to road rollers, increasing the efficiency and even compressing of asphalt coverings in new road construction.
Reinhold and Fritz are creators and “gurus” exhibiting the right mix of creativity, charisma, and collaborative skills. They excite other people about their innovations. There are other types of influencers who are crucial in bringing a new innovation over the tipping point to success. Let’s look at one of the most famous innovators of all times – Leonardo da Vinci.

Innovation by Collaboration
In addition to being one of the most creative innovators ever, Leonardo da Vinci also an excellent team player. His talent in dealing with other people in difficult situations was legendary. His biographer Vasari describes how, when Leonardo was still an apprentice with the famous painter Verrocchio, his depiction of an angelic figure was so masterful that Verrocchio considered giving up painting. Leonardo replied that it was the greatest compliment to the master that the student should exceed the master’s ability.
Later in life, Leonardo built up a community around him that included renowned mathematician Luca Pacioli as well as devoted younger artists such as Andrea Salai and Francesco Melzi. Vasari wrote that Leonardo’s “generosity was so great that he sheltered and fed all his friends, rich and poor alike, provided they possessed talent and ability.”
People like Leonardo da Vinci are life-long learners, “swarming together” with other intellectual giants. Pacioli not only invented double accounting, but also worked with Leonardo on his engineering exploits. Leonardo purchased a copy of Pacioli’s famous book on Euclidian geometry before the two ever met. Leonard drew the figures in their joint work on Divina proportione, a book in which they studied the “golden ratio” and related Euclidean theorems. Later, Leonardo and Pacioli taught each other in a mutually enriching relationship of learning and tutoring relationship, with Leonardo clearly having the sponsoring role.
Leonardo da Vinci is, arguably, the most famous inventor ever. But it makes no sense to look at innovators in isolation. We need to study both the innovator and the people that surround the creative genius. On the one hand, the innovator needs to be practical and down-to-earth enough to be understood by his surroundings. Innovators must be able to position their inventions in their environment and successfully convince others of their value to create sustainable progress. That’s what Leonardo was able to do with his mechanical engineering and military inventions and his paintings, frescos, and statues. On the other hand, the innovator must also get along with the people surrounding him. Each innovation needs the group of early adaptors and rapid followers that understand the genius innovator and his innovative ideas. They form the beehive or ant colony that acts as bridge and translator to spread the concept. At the core of the COIN there are the charismatic, inspirational and creative thought leaders who are enough in synch with their time and environment for their innovations to be recognized as such. But similarly important are the people around the core innovators; people who are willing to play a supporting role in making a great idea succeed.
While we all have the preconceived image of the genius in his experimental cabinet cranking out inventions, the people surrounding the genius are at least similarly important, forming the Collaborative Innovation Network working in “swarm creativity” to develop the innovation. Leonardo da Vinci had a whole support organization of painters, sculptors, and other artists on his payroll that helped to deliver his master works. Leonardo treated and paid them well; in return they worked for his brand. Leonardo would not have succeeded had he not spoken in a language understood by his environment and had he not been surrounded by a team of collaborative innovators.
Of course, even Leonardo sometimes fell into the trap of being too much ahead, and not communicating in a language understood by his disciples. When he described parachutes, planes, and helicopters, for instance, he ahead of his time by hundreds of years (Figure 2.1).

Leonardo was the core of a self-organizing swarm of similarly minded artists and scientists, working together in the creative chaos of Renaissance Italy. The swarm used the same self-organizing properties employed by social insects employ: positive feedback, negative feedback, randomness, and multiple interactions. It was a nurturing environment where collaboration was amplified by positive feedback (for instance, Leonardo and Pacioli working on their book on golden ratio, which neither could have completed on his own). Early on, Leonardo honed his collaborative skills when he successfully dealt with negative feedback by other artists less brilliant than himself. Similarly to the positive use of chaos and randomness by insects, Leonardo used the chaotic environment in Northern Italy to maintain his independence, to find the most generous and venturous sponsors, and to bring around him the best disciples. And finally, similar to ants that need multiple interactions with each other to complete their tasks successfully, Leonardo could excel only in an environment bustling with other painters, sculptors, mathematicians, and scientists, building upon each other’s work in continuous “coopetition.”

The diffusion of disruptive innovations generally follows the same process. First, there is a genius with a brilliant idea. Working in relative isolation, the genius develops this idea and implements the first prototypes. But those ideas are so far ahead of their time that the people around the genius do not recognize their greatness. It takes a collaborative leader able to congregate a group of dedicated disciples to spread out the message. This leader has a charismatic yet collaborative personality, is highly persuasive and contagious, and shepherds his disciples towards the communal vision. The motivated disciples infect the environment with their enthusiasm and get things going until they reach the tipping point, where the new idea becomes part of daily life. Together, the collaborative leaders and the motivated disciples constitute a COIN.

Familiar Examples of the COIN-Driven Innovation Process
There are many familiar examples of this COIN-driven innovation process, even if readers may not realize the involvement of COINs. Personal computers, the Web, the Internet, and Linux have already been mentioned. There were early innovators such as Douglas Engelbart, who returned from World War II, where he had been a radar technician, with a vision of working interactively with computers. His inventions were crucial for the success of both the personal computer and the Web. Between 1963 and 1968, Engelbart invented technologies to support individual knowledge workers and collaboration within groups of knowledge workers. Out of his work came the computer mouse, multiple windows on a screen, and e-mail. Another researcher, Ivan Sutherland, created the first graphics package called “sketchpad” while working at MIT. Sutherland and Engelbart are typical “early genius” inventors, defining a new field with no expectation of raking in financial profits.

The distinction of being collaborative leaders of the PC revolution goes to Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, Robert Taylor, and Charles Thacker. They built the Altos, the first personal computer, while at Xerox Parc. The first of the motivated disciples to recognize clearly the significance of that invention was Steve Jobs of Apple, who popularized the concept of the personal computer. The later disciples collected even larger rewards. People such as Robert Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, combine technical skills with an uncanny foresight and vision, the capability to create a highly cohesive company culture, and great salesmanship. We can see how well this paid them back for them!
The creation of the Internet, the global computer network that is the foundation of the Web, delivers an even more compelling story of how a group of intrinsically motivated people can drive open disruptive innovation.
The creation of the Internet was very much driven by COINs. Soon after the first mainframe computers had been developed for military use in World War II, a few visionary thinkers realized that by linking these mainframes they could make much better use of computers. They were motivated not by financial reward or promotion but by a deep desire to further technical development. It was clear to those visionaries that the usefulness of the computer network would grow exponentially with the number of linked computers.
The goal of the early Internet visionaries was to develop an open networking standard linking computers of any make and model anywhere on the globe using publicly available networks such as the phone system. Dr. J.C.R. Licklider, or “Lick”, as friends, colleagues, and acquaintances called him, was the best known among them, and he had a vision of allowing simultaneous use of the expensive mainframe computers of his time to multiple users. Newly appointed in 1962 to head the Computer Research Division at the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Lick oversaw the biggest computer-related research budget of the U.S. government. Against the advice of the computer establishment, he used his position to mastermind time-sharing computers and then to fund development on the Arpanet, thus single-handedly creating Internetworking. In 1960, he accurately foresaw the Internet, envisaging
thinking centers, that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval. …. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire service.
Contemporaries describe Lick as a man who retained his modesty despite his considerable influence on computing. The list of people he selected and put in charge of implementing his vision at research universities that included MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, UC Berkeley, and Stanford reads like a “Who’s Who” of today’s computer research leaders.

The people who further extended the Arpanet into the Internet formed a Collaborative Innovation Network in its purest form. A self-organizing network of individuals, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its predecessor organizations have steered the development of the Internet for the past 30 years – without any central authority. Anybody could (and still can) join an IETF working group.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is a loosely self-organized group of people who make technical and other contributions to the engineering and evolution of the Internet and its technologies. … There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone may register for and attend any meeting. The closest thing there is to being an IETF member is being on the IETF or working group mailing list.

There have been hundreds of IETF working groups since its first meeting on January 1986 in San Diego, with 15 attendees. The predecessor of IETF, the Network Working Group (NWG) goes back 18 years earlier. Those working groups have been developing seminal standards and public domain implementations like TCP/IP, the main communication protocol of the Internet, Internet mail, or the protocol to manage millions of hosts on the network. Each IETF working group functions as a COIN, where a small core team, driven by visionary leaders such as Vinton Cerf and David Clark, collaborates on developing the specifications, while other members act as a sounding board, reading and commenting on the specs and testing the so-called “reference” software implementations developed by the core team. IETF working group participants receive no financial compensation. They are normally on loan from a company research lab, paid by an academic institution, or self-employed consultants. Their main motivation to participate is the desire to be part of the further development of the Internet and to advance the state of the art in internetworking technology.
These individuals share this intrinsic motivation with the group of programmers that created the World Wide Web, which evolved in a similar way to the Internet. Early geniuses such as Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Doug Engelbart laid the groundwork by inventing the technologies needed for the success of the Web, such as linking, hypertext, multiple windows and the computer mouse. Collaborative leaders such as Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau recognized the importance of these inventions and put the pieces together. But again, it took motivated disciples to carry the innovation over the tipping point and trigger the tidal wave of e-business. Netscape’s Marc Andreessen, e-Bay’s Pierre Omidya, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos all combine the technical prowess of a maven with the wide people network of a connector and great salesmanship. Not only did they launch highly successful companies, but they also redefined their respective industries and reshaped their competitive landscapes in the process. They share these characteristics with the open source programmers who created Linux.

Collaboration Between Innovators is the Key
Fritz Bircher and Reinhold Krause in Switzerland are perpetual innovators. That makes them perspicuous COIN members. But besides being very smart and having creative ideas, they are also excellent team players. This means that in their COIN that formed around GPS-controlled lawn mowers and MobileJet printers they have built up a collaborative team culture, based on meritocratic principles. This does not mean that hierarchy is absent; to the contrary, it is clear that Reinhold and Fritz are the leaders. But they give credit to whom credit is due, and foster a transparent work environment with high respect for the individual.
For the success of a COIN, it is the middle phase of the invent – create – sell process that is most critical. The MobileJet would never have been possible if Reinhold and Fritz had not collaborated creatively. In this second, collaborative creation phase, Reinhold’s mechanical engineering skills and Fritz’s software and electrical engineering skills were pooled together to carry a truly innovative product from concept to implementation, transforming it from a lofty idea into a working solution. The interaction between Reinhold, Fritz, and the 12 graduate students and research assistants in their COIN at Burgdorf was the catalyst in this crucial phase. Once they had something to demonstrate, Fritz and Reinhold communicated with the outside world. Their innovations have been featured on Swiss television, for instance, which has in turn led to contacts from potential users and investors.

For a COIN to succeed and get its ideas off the ground, there must be creativity, collaboration, and communication. Only a combination of people who bring these traits – the DNA of COINs – to the team can succeed in bringing a COIN’s innovation over the tipping point. That DNA is the subject of the next chapter.