Smart Communities and Networked Organizations

The reduction in human interaction costs enabled by social computing technologies has created opportunities for companies to reduce the cost of growth and of innovation both by getting much more value out of their own personnel and by using people they do not employ to create value for them, either gratis, or for a fee to be paid only after the value is created. Recognition of these opportunities is driving business reorganization by “early adopter” companies pursuing the benefits to be derived from business applications of social computing. These benefits are anchored in the growing centrality to wealth creation of continuous innovation. Continuous innovation, in turn, is critically dependent on tacit interactions among people, that is, on interactions that provide access to implicit, as well as explicit, knowledge, information, experience and expertise possessed by possibly very large numbers of people, who may be widely distributed, organizationally, and even globally.