Liquid Networks foster innovation

“Liquid networks” refers to networks that are adaptable and can change over time, with new connections and collaborations forming and dissolving. These types of networks allow for the free flow of ideas and resources, leading to a high degree of serendipity and the emergence of new, unexpected (disruptive) innovations.

Steven Johnson discusses “liquid networks” in Where Good Ideas Come From:

A metropolis shares one key characteristic with the Web: both environments are dense, liquid networks where information easily flows along multiple unpredictable paths....Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches. They make it easier to disseminate good ideas, of course, but they also do something more sublime: they help complete ideas.^[1]

Exploration of new ideas is enhanced by inefficient, decentralized, divergent contexts that foster exploration:

Efficiency is generally held to be a universal goal for any economy—unless the economy happens to traffic in ideas. If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. ...And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we’ve erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others. ... That deliberate inefficiency doesn’t exist in the fourth quadrant. No, these nonmarket, decentralized environments do not have immense paydays to motivate their participants. But their openness creates other, powerful opportunities for good ideas to flourish. All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters—liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise, exaptation, emergent platforms—do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels. In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate.^[2]

The implications are not only for teams, but also for personal knowledge management (PKM) and thinking patterns:

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.^[3]

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