Coolfarming – Lessons from the Beehive to Increase Organizational Creativity

This paper introduces Collaborative Innovation Networks as an engine for self-organizing disruptive innovation. It is illustrated by the metaphor of the bee swarm through four lessons from the beehive: “centralized leadership – rotating leaders – waggle dance – attraction pheromone” as key principles for managing self-organizing teams of creators. In combination with applying social network analysis through knowledge flow optimization, managers get a powerful new tool to radically increase creativity and performance of their organizations. Among many well-known examples (LEGO Mindstorms, Apple, Wikipedia), the paper also introduces an extensive case study in health are, the C3N project which creates Collaborative Care Networks for patients of chronic diseases.