Nurturing Innovation Webs – Step 1: The Digital Twins

Based on multiple discussions this post is intended to provide some orientation regarding HOW to create a very first view of the innovation web in order to “tee off” the process of nurturing an innovation from ideation through commercialization using the concept of innovation web. The image shows a high level example of this using the network member www.entovation.com which represents a network of innovators in their own right.

The image consists of the results from a crawl of the www.entovation.com site in order to identify all URLs up to three levels down. The crawl was completed using the EF Webcrawler 0.3.2 tool and the results then imported to Gephi 0.9.2 for visualization as a network with 518 nodes (webpages of organizations) and 798 edges (URLs). The graphical representation of white on black was chosen to exemplify that collaboration lets relationships “glow” like a constellation of stars.

Each node / organization was then classified at a high level based on the roles needed in the innovation web, therefore red = innovator, green = product packager, yellow = user, brown = marketeer, turquoise = seller, white = funder and grey = buyer. Furthermore some key statistics of the network created by the web crawl where then calculated using Gephi (i.e. Average Degree centrality: 1.54 / Network Diameter: 4 / Density: 0.003 / Communities: 7 / Clustering Coefficent: 0.028 / Average Path Length: 2.4) since these are metrics by which this “digital twin” of the innovation web needs to be managed by. The next step is to map the roles (and their participants) to the innovation web archetypes, complete a more thorough value network analysis to understand tangible and intangible exchanges plus multiple value network indicators (i.e. robustness and agility of the innovation web) to then generate a series of actionable interventions to nurture the innovation webs forward.

Is the web crawl or role based network of www.entovation.com “healthy” or “effective”? For one this can only be answered in a manner relative to other maps and based on the next steps, and furthermore this particular example is “organization centric” since it puts a single organization in the centre of review – what is needed however is to map and evaluate industry spaces consisting of multiple organizations and then to focus on the “relationship gaps” which need to be “woven” into a more robust and agile structure – more on that in the future.

For those familiar with these areas of work the high level sequence is: “internet web crawl (analysis)”, “organizational network analysis”, “social network analysis”, “value network analysis”, and finally “web weaving”; all based on the archetypes an idea needs to flow through from ideation through commercialization.

If you would like run an analysis on a digital web of your interest let us know and we will be happy to support.

To join the network please visit our LinkedIn Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8779542/