Group items tagged

"At Reebok, the cushioning in a best-selling basketball shoe reflects technology borrowed from intravenous fluid bags. Semiconductor firm Qualcomm's revolutionary color display technology is rooted in the microstructures of the Morpho butterfly's wings. And at IDEO, developers designed a leak-proof water bottle using the technology from a shampoo bottle top. These examples show how so-called "peripheral" knowledge - that is, ideas from domains that are seemingly irrelevant to a given task - can influence breakthrough innovation. "The central idea of peripheral knowledge really resonates," says Wharton management professor Martine Haas. After all, who can't think of examples when ideas that seemed to bear almost no relation to a given problem paid off in some unexpected way? By bringing peripheral knowledge to core tasks, it is well known that work groups can recombine ideas in novel and useful ways. But the problem, Haas notes, is primarily one of attention: How do you get workers focused on a particular task to notice - and make use of - seemingly irrelevant information?"

"Fascinating insight from the MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence at the IBM Think Forum. The video is 40mins long but worth watching if you're interested in what makes groups effective in solving complex problems. It also shows how (and why) the idea of 'distributed leadership' is becoming more widely seen as the future model for managing organisations and complexity."

An overview of Systems Thinking, and how to apply the ideas of Complexity Theory to management of systems, with the results being called "Complexity Thinking"