Overview

How can you tap into the combined wisdom of the crowd, experts, and swarms to discover and develop new trends? Find the trendsetters on the Web, Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online social networks, and you will also find the cool trends that are created by the trendsetters!

Coolhunting applies dynamic social network analysis to these online sources to predict what will be cool tomorrow. Coolfarming employs social marketing to grow and nurture the cool trends in communities.

In this course you will learn how to Coolhunt – to use the Condor dynamic social network analysis tool to mine the Web, online news, blogs, e-mail, and other communication archives to discover Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs), cyber teams of innovative people. Radically new innovations that changed the way we do things, like the creation of the Web, the iPhone, or Lego toys, are not the work of one genius mastermind, but of COINs, innovative groups of intrinsically motivated people who collaborate as self-organizing teams. Discover these COINs, and you have found the new trends. Help the COINs succeed, and you help those new trends get over the tipping point. You will also learn how to Coolfarm– to support the creation of new trends by engaging trendsetters in online social networks and supporting the swarm creativity of COINs. This way you will get the community – the swarm – to embrace the trends and guarantee their success.

Participants

Course participants will be advanced undergraduate and graduate students from 4 universities in the US and Europe, forming virtual teams with at least one member from each university

• MIT (Sloan School of Management)
• SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design)
• University of Cologne (Dept. of Information Systems and Inf. Mgmt.)
• Helsinki University of Technology (SoberIT)

Course Goals

Learn how to Coolhunt on the Web, in blogs, online forums, and other communication archives using the dynamic social network analysis tool Condor.

Learn how to Coolfarm, making the COINs you discover in your Coolhunt more effective and productive.

Learn about yourself and your own communication behavior by watching a “virtual mirror” of your own communication behavior. See how team members perceive you, as a communicator, a collaborator, or a coordinator.

Learn to communicate in a multinational, multicultural multidisciplinary group with people from Finland, Germany, and the US, by collaborating in a globally distributed virtual team.

Learn how to use instant messaging, e-mail, blogs, wikis, web conferencing most effectively.

Students will work as self-organizing teams on a project individually chosen by each group of students. Participants can contribute their own project ideas or choose to work on one of the many interesting project suggestions. Exceptional results will lead to a scientific publication.

Course Organization

The course is organized in 4 modules (see picture below), each phase finishes with a plenary presentation. Course language is English.

1. Coolhunting Academy

The introductory 4-day Coolhunting Academy teaches you the foundations of dynamic social network analysis, and of swarm creativity, COINs, Coolhunting and Coolfarming. Coolhunting Academies will be offered on site at HUT, MIT, SCAD, and Cologne. Alternatively, there is the opportunity to attend the Coolhunting Academy Oct 5-8 in combination with the first global COIN conference at SCAD in Savannah. Contact Peter if you are interested in this opportunity.

2. Coolhunting for trends

Each team will choose a community (either a real organization or company, or an online community) and analyze its communication behavior, identifying the trendsetters and influencers, this way also finding the cool trends.

3. Increase swarm creativity of team

After completion of module 2, teams will use dynamic social network analysis to look at their own communication behavior inside the team, the class, and the rest of the world, thus increasing their own swarm creativity.

4. Coolfarming the trends

Teams will continue the work of module 2, deepening the analysis and identify the dynamics and long term trends of the community they have chosen to analyze in module 2. In the end they will come up with predictions for the future behavior of their community, and develop recommendations of how to increase its productivity.

Meetings

There will be three types of meeting. First, there will be the Coolhunting Academy, a 4-day block course to learn the basics of dynamic social network analysis, Condor, information retrieval, COINs, and Coolhunting and Coolfarming. There will be 4 presentations, plus bi-weekly status meetings. Besides, students are expected to work independently in their teams on their Coolhunting & Coolfarming projects. 

Plenary Presentations

There are four main meetings, where physical attendance in the classrooms in Cambridge, Savannah, Helsinki and Cologne is recommended:

1. Team building: students form virtual teams (COINs), selecting the topics for their Coolhunting and Coolfarming and deciding on what team to join. 
2. Analysis results (Coolhunting): students present the results of their analysis.
3. Team communication analysis: students present lessons learned from the analysis of their own team communication behavior.
4. Final presentation (Coolfarming): students present the final results of their work.

Bi-weekly status meetings

In addition, there will be bi-weekly status meetings, where students are free to participate through web conferencing (Flashmeeting) from home, office, etc.

• Project teams fill out status template on course wiki prior to meeting
• 5 min Flashmeeting presentation by project team
• 10 minutes of online discussion and instructor feedback per team
• Other course participants give written individual constructive criticism to one other project per participant on wiki project page after presentation