We are an international swarm without a queen.

The CKN project operates as a Collaborative Innovation Network (COIN). While team members work together virtually all the time, they have their physical offices at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, University of Cologne, Savannah College of Art and Design, and Aalto University in Finland.

Thomas J. Allen

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, Emeritus.

Professor of Organization Studies


He also serves as co-director of the Lean Aerospace Initiative, a very large collaborative effort, involving government, industry, organized labor and MIT, to reduce the cost and improve the quality of aerospace system development and manufacture. Professor Allen served as Deputy Dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT from 1993 to 1998.

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Kai Fischbach

University of Bamberg, Germany

Professor, Chair in Information Systems and Social Networks


Kai Fischbach is Professor and Chair in Information Systems and Social Networks at University of Bamberg. Previously he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Systems and Information Management at the University of Cologne (Germany). He is also Chief Scientist of software startup galaxyadvisors. His areas of expertise include the analysis of communication networks and the design of efficient information exchanges.

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Andrea Fronzetti Colladon

University of Rome Tor Vergata

Research Fellow, Department of Enterprise Engineering


​Andrea is a Research Fellow and an Adjunct Professor of Engineering Economics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata; he cooperates on research projects carried out at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, where he was a visiting scholar. His research interests include social network and semantic analysis, innovation management and organizational communication. He also works as a management consultant and business coach.

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Cristobal Garcia

P. Universidad Catolica of Chile

Assistant Professor, School of Business


Cristobal Garcia is Director of EmprendeUC and Assistant Professor of Innovation, Design Thinking and Entrepreneurship at the P. Universidad Catolica of Chile (PUC)’s School of Business. Cristobal is also Co-Director of the new PUC’s Innovation Master Program in collaboration with Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and Founder of both the Laboratory for Innovation (aka iLabUC), and the DO FUTURE program. Cristobal’s research areas are: interdisciplinary electronic networks in higher education, workplaces for innovation (forthcoming book), and education curricula for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

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Peter A. Gloor

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Research Scientist, Center for Collective Intelligence (MIT)


Peter A. Gloor is a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT's Sloan School of Management where he leads a project exploring Collaborative Innovation Networks. He is also Honorary Professor at University of Cologne, lecturer at Aalto University Helsinki and Distinguished Visiting Professor at P. Universidad Catolica of Chile. As Chief Creative Officer of software company galaxyadvisors he puts his theoretical insights into practice.

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Julia Gluesing

Wayne State University, USA

Research Professor, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering


Julia also serves as the Associate Director of the Institute for Information Technology and Culture (IITC), and is an adjunct professor of Anthropology. In her current assignment in Engineering, she is responsible for the development of a global engineering management masters program for working engineers.

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Francesca Grippa

Northeastern University

Assistant Professor, College of Professional Studies


Francesca Grippa's current activities combine strategic project management with Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools. She continues to publish and present internationally on innovative applications of SNA and the development of learning communities.

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Caspar Lassenius

Aalto University, Finland

Professor, Software Business and Engineering Institute


Caspar studies software engineering from the process point of view, working in close cooperation with our industrial partners. He aims at performing empirical and constructive research that is of both high practical utility and academically rigorous. Recently, he focussed his research on software product development, agile methodologies, and global software development.

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Rob Laubacher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Research Scientist, Center for Collective Intelligence


Rob´s research looks at how information technology is transforming business organizations and how those changes were reshaping the employment contract. Rob published articles based on this work in academic venues and in Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times and Boston Globe. Rob has been quoted for ideas from this research on National Public Radio and in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Fast Company.

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Christine Miller

Savannah College of Art and Design, USA

Professor of Design Management


Her research interests include how sociality and culture influence the design of new products, processes and technologies. She also studies technology-mediated communication within groups, teams and networks and the emergence of technology-enabled collaborative innovation networks (COINs).

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Keiichi Nemoto

Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan

Visiting Scholar, Center for Collective Intelligence (MIT)


Keiichi is a research scientist at Fuji Xerox, and currently a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He focuses on collaboration networks through the lens of social network analysis, using Wikipedias in different languages as a topic of analysis. He is also interested in the beauty of networks, visualizing collaboration, communication, and concept networks in Wikipedia.

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Daniel Oster

University of Cologne, Germany

Student, Department of Information Systems and Information Management


Daniel´s research interests are enterprise development and information management. He especially focuses on the impact of social networks on business performance. Levels of measurement are teams, branches/departments and intraorganizational communication. He also works for the Center for Social Network Analysis in Management and Society at University of Cologne.

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Maria Paasivaara

Aalto University, Finland

Visiting Scholar, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence


Maria studies communication in innovation networks, concentrating especially on communication needs, practices, and problems in innovation networks. She has participated in several research projects studying networked product development and supply chain management. Her PhD thesis was on “Communication in Product Development Networks”.

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Molly Pace-Scrivener

Cincinnati Children's Hospital

Project Specialist, C3N


Molly holds a BA in Organizational Communication with Research Methods from Xavier University. Currently, she is a project specialist for the Collaborative Chronic Care Network (aka the C3N Project), where she manages Team Science and works on coolhunting, email analysis/virtual mirroring, and social network analysis..

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Shannon Provost

University of Texas, Austin

PhD Student, McCombs School of Business


Shannon Provost is a PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin, building a research program at the intersection of information systems, the science of improvement, and innovation in health care delivery. Current projects include studies of social network analysis and communication structures with the Collaborative Chronic Care Network. She is also interested in complexity science, creativity, and communities-of-practice.

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Ken Riopelle

Wayne State University, USA

Research Professor, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering


Dr. Riopelle is a Research Professor at Wayne State University in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Detroit Michigan. His career spans thirty plus years in automotive consulting and has specialized in the diffusion of innovations in globally networked organizations. He was the Director of Research for Sandy Corporation.

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Manfred Vogel

University of Applied Sciences, Northwestern Switzerland

Head Computer Science Department


After studying electronic engineering, Manfred obtained a diploma as a mathematician from the ETH Zurich and a PhD in Physics. He worked for a decade as an astrophysics researcher, mainly on the theory of symbiotic binaries but also on satellite based observations e.g. with the Hubble Space Telescope. Becoming a full time professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Northwestern Switzerland, he founded the Institute of 4D-Technologies, leading it until 2008. Since then he serves as the head of the Computer Science Department. His main research interests are optimization methods and machine learning algorithms.

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Xue Zhang

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

PhD Student, NUDT Changsha


Xue is studying communication patterns to predict the performance and creativity of groups of teams, ranging from small teams to large online communities.

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See also

Featured work

  • Featured work
    Coolfarming

    What exactly is the “magic of cool”? What makes products like the iPhone cool? (Or, in its own day, the phonograph?) And what if you could make your own ideas cool? What if you could even turn them into the next big thing? Amazon Link

  • Featured work
    Coolhunting

    Coolhunting goes to the very heart of the search by showing how to find trendsetters and spot innovations and how to turn brilliant ideas into hot new trends. Amazon Link

  • Featured work
    Swarm Creativity

    A COIN is a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal--n innovation-by sharing ideas, information, and work. It is no exaggeration to state that COINs are the most productive engines of innovation ever. They are "Creative Swarms"Amazon Link

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