The "Six Degrees" World of Inventors

[swestrup]

Here is a nifty article about the natural flows of information along informal networks between inventors and innovators working at different companies. Its obvious that inventive individuals are going to want to talk to like-minded folks, and by fostering communications between your employees and their various contacts a company can have a net information gain. After all, the rest of the world is a far bigger place than any company, so the number of usefull ideas that a communication barrier keeps out is far larger than the number that it keeps in.