Colleagues,
Please see below the 1st of a 4 part series of posts from
Dr. Leigh Jerome, Phd, Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) study on "Next Generation Social Networks" involving MedTech-IQ. ENJOY!
CC
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Next Generation Social Networking: Collaborative Innovation (first of a four-part series)
Successful innovation yields new products and services, gives rise to new markets, and generates enterprise growth contributing to higher productivity, lower costs and increased profits. How can we use social networking platforms and tools to accelerate the innovation process? This four-part series will describe the utility and potential of next generation social networking and describe an enterprise now underway for creating global value chains of research and development.
Knowledge spillovers are the lynchpin for innovation. Innovation events increase wherever there is a rich flow of knowledge from multiple sources. Silicon Valley was built on this principle, with a tight concentration of co-located firms, universities and public institutions. Co-location has long been the gold standard for facilitating knowledge spillovers by providing opportunities for both planned and serendipitous interaction potential. This, in turn, promotes networks and activities that accelerate innovation potential. But, globalization has changed both the concept of proximity and the scope of innovation.
Innovation is no longer dependent on the transferring of particular technologies. Today’s innovations are more often the result of collaborations where knowledge transfer influences research and development opportunities. Global connectivity accommodates new technological and organizational structures that enable innovation. The past two decades have witnessed an upsurge in formal and informal collaborative mechanisms at global, regional and national levels.
Further, new innovations increasingly require the blending of elite knowledge from multiple disciplines. The respective skill sets of individual disciplines and sectors fall short of addressing the complex and refractory nature of global problems and the multi-faceted requirements of many life-science endeavors. Work across traditional boundaries through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration is increasingly considered a scientific and social imperative. Effective alliances among government, academic, and industry, or triple helix partnerships, show great promise for creating new value chains that can rapidly move science-based knowledge from discovery to commercialization.
Global geographical dispersion of knowledge, technology, and industry has created distributed agglomerations, like MedTechIQ, where concentrated handfuls of specialized clusters can flourish. Partnerships offer expanded opportunities for financial flows, technology transfers, information flows and the interpenetration of business activities. International linkages are essential to the continuous growth of an enterprise cluster. Thick networks allow more diverse and fruitful linkages to emerge. Cross-cutting mechanisms for bringing the benefits of new products, new processes, and new knowledge to the market will have positive impact for economic growth and human welfare.
The advent of the Internet, social networking modalities and collaborative technologies affords new opportunities for utilizing global social networks and distributed collaborative innovation. National Science Foundation support is providing MedTechIQ members an opportunity to bring together scientists, policy makers, and the private sector across networks, to create a network of networks that facilitate economic and social advances.
The second article in this series on next generation social networking will describe the current challenge before us that can lead to a global collaborative network for innovation.
References
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