Peter Gloor
President and Chief Science Officer, iQuest Analytics, Inc.
Swiss-born Peter Gloor is a classic renaissance man. He has a Ph.D. in computer science. He's an avid hiker. And he can play Chopin on the piano as skillfully as he can explain complex mathematical algorithms.
He's also written his fifth book, Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage Through Collaborative Innovation. "I'm always running the risk of trying to do too many things at once," he says.
In his book, Gloor draws upon his experience with more than 40 organizations during the past decade to share insights about Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) and swarm creativity.
A COIN, according to Gloor, is a "cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving an innovation by sharing ideas, information, and work." The power that keeps the COIN engine running is what Gloor calls swarm creativity. "Swarm creativity is like a beehive or ant colony," he says. "It may look chaotic from the outside, but everyone has a job, knows what to do, and does it."
Indeed, examples of COIN-based innovation abound in the age of the Web. Wikipedia, the online dictionary founded by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales in 2001, now has more than one million surprisingly accurate and complete entries, each completed by one of the more than 100,000 volunteer contributors to the site.
Gloor sees an equally compelling case study in the rise of the open-source Linux operating system, now the most popular alternative to Microsoft's Windows. "Open source software is developed faster, better, more securely, and at a lower cost than closed source software. Teams of open source software developers operate as near-ideal COINs, coordinating their creative efforts through swarm intelligence."
"The critical point here is that in social insect colonies, as in COINs, there is no individual giving marching orders. Neither the ant queen nor the lead developer of an open source team directs the individual behavior," explains Gloor.
Gloor contends that swarm creativity has clear advantages in accomplishing complex tasks: it affords flexibility, robustness, and self-repair. Errors and lack of centralized control are not only acceptable, but even welcome. It's these very features of COINs that make revolutionary innovations possible, where no single human intellect could get the job done—projects like the World Wide Web.
Gloor didn't just invent the concept of swarm creativity; he experienced it himself as a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. "I was part of a small group of people that wanted to do something revolutionary for computer science education," he recalls.
His team's goal was to develop an educational CD-ROM that would explain the highly complex subject of computer algorithms—one of the hardest parts of computer science—in a more interactive and visual way.
After two years of hard work, Gloor's group published Animated Algorithms, a CD-ROM that received quite a bit of fanfare from expert reviewers and users alike. His experience on the team ignited an interest in COINs: "it showed me that COINs are both powerful examples of teamwork and great levers of individual strengths."
After his time at MIT, Gloor climbed the ranks of several major banks and consulting firms in Europe. Following stints as a section leader for software at Union Bank of Switzerland, he served as a strategic consultant for DaimlerChrysler, Roche, Caterpillar and the U.N. and became a partner at Deloitte Consulting, where he led its $100 million e-business practice in Europe.
Throughout this time, Gloor couldn't shake the importance of swarm creativity. He left Deloitte in 2002 for a position in academia that would allow him to further explore the genesis and impact of COINs.
He also co-founded iQuest Analytics, a company that develops and sells software and services to "predict the future." Its software employs a unique visual way to discover hidden relationships and the "unknown unknowns" by mining unstructured data such as the Web, e-mail logs, phone archives, and Intranets. The company's motto is "harnessing human intelligence," and Gloor serves as both president and chief science officer.
In the end, Gloor recognizes the contribution of individuals, but also maintains that networks are essential for reaping the rewards of innovation: "While every innovation can be traced back to individuals, it is collaboration among creators that brings disruptive innovations over the tipping point."