Little did I know when I was attending one of the evening events of Swissnex that I was about to meet a truly impressive creator. After filling a heaped plate of food at the sumptuous buffet after the talks, I was looking for a place to eat when I noticed two attractive women in the back of the room. As soon as we started talking I noticed that they were not just a pleasure to look at and talk with but real creators. In my discussion with Magdalena, she told me that she was a graphic artist producing digital art. When she invited me to visit her in her studio I jumped at the opportunity.

On a sunny afternoon the next week I climbed the stairs to her studio in Revere outside of Boston. The studio doubles as a gallery, displaying really cool art. When we sat on her couch in the middle of art books and framed digital pictures, Magdalena told me a bit about her life. She was born in Poland to parents of German descent, as a young adult she moved to Germany, later after she had married an American she moved to Boston, where initially she continued working as a biologist for a research company. Ten years ago, however, she decided to quit natural science and to exclusively focus on art. In her art she takes digital photographs of people, dressing them in medieval cloth and embedding them in a renaissance style environment, giving her digital pictures the feel of Rubens or Boticelli paintings. For her digital paintings she needs lots of models, whose pictures she takes on the floor of her living room. She has a wide circle of models and friends, drawn from fellow artists, painters, photographers, and actors but also including scientists from her previous work. One of the more interesting ones is Niki the crossdresser with large wig at night - Nick the scientist during the day.

Her masterpiece until now is “the sleepers” (extract pictured below), a digital composition of 35 models, combining 35 digital photographs of 25 different people into a surreal nightly landscape of ethereal beauty.

When I asked her how she finances her art, she told me that she works seven days a week, only now it’s not work anymore but her passion and labor of love. She explained “I want to spend my time to become a better artist, and not wasting my time selling art”. This of course means, that besides creating art, and occasionally selling art, Magdalena is doing all sorts of odd jobs. She has folded towels in “bed & bath”, and she worked as a temp usher during the entire last stay of Cirque du Soleil in Boston. During these jobs she never stops promoting her art. While working at Cirque du Soleil, she produced one of her signature large digital artistic creations with some models from Cirque du Soleil, and asked for permission to put it up in the tent. When her temp manager denied the request she found another employee of Cirque du Soleil who put it up for her in the break room of the internal employees of the Cirque.

She even succeeded in having some of her art shown in the ICA – the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. This happened when one day she learned that next Saturday morning the ICA would show 100 pieces of art from local artists. Needless to say she was the first one at the door next Saturday at six in the morning, not only assuring a premium spot for her piece of art, but even winning an award for the best picture.

For a change, Magdalena likes to go out to art shows and cultural events like the one from Swissnex at the Harvard Business School where we met. Another favorite of hers are the events from the Goethe Institute in downtown Boston. Not only is there good food at these events, but also good company, and the opportunity to recruit more models for her masterpieces, and perhaps even a customer or two.

When I asked her what motivates her, the first thing I noticed was a fierce sense of independence and self-determination. This reminded me of the famous quote of Perikles, politician during Athen’s golden age of democracy: “Make up your mind that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous”. Magdalena put her own principle into the following words “You end up where you want to go if you let go without knowing how you will get there.”
Her main motivation to do what she does is twofold: seeing the happiness of people when they acquire her art, and the big satisfaction she draws from the process of creating new art.

One of her ways of increasing dissemination of her art is to choose her models well. If they like her art and their own representation in Magdalena’s pictures, they will spread the word. Usually this works very well, at least it worked for me. At the end of my visit she had successfully recruited me as a model for her next masterpiece, tentatively named “the wall”, which will combine a large number of people building up and tearing down a wall.

I think every member of a COIN can learn a lot from Magdalena!

Here is an updated analysis of the Oscar predictions, run on March 2^nd, 2010. Again, sources being used were the collective mind of movie enthusiasts on IMDb.com and movie fans from all around the world represented by bloggers and Web masters. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was analyzed using a specialized version of sentiment retrieval with an adapted bag-of-words. Web and blog buzz values come from Cooltrend. Tapping the thoughts of this swarm delivered the following update to our older analysis:

While IMDb users have two clear favorites, Hurt Locker and Avatar, the Web seems to favor Hurt Locker. Bloggers are seeing 500 Days of Summer in front right now, but this might change since the blogosphere tends to be relatively volatile in opinion trends. So, in sum we would expect Avatar to have the best chances on winning best picture, followed by Hurt Locker.

Directors - here it is again a head-to-head race between Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker) and James Cameron (Avatar). They seem to be tightly correlated with the best picture results and this is probably not too surprising. Interestingly the Web sees James Cameron while Kathryn Bigelow is really not that popular. Blogosphere is undecided in this category, Mr. Cameron is clearly behind in the buzz though.

The surprise nomination of Sandra Bullock for the best actress award caught us last time we made the prediction - including her this time shows that she still is behind IMDb's favorite Meryl Streep. Looking at actors the following picture rises:

Again IMDb decided on a clear favorite and it is Jeff Bridges. While Jeremy Renner and Colin Firth certainly receive some attention in discussion they are both only half as popular in the forums as Jeff Bridges is.

In summary we now give our final prediction, with a primary (the most likely winner) and a secondary choice, based on the collective mind of the Internet's movie swarm:

It is really a close decision in best picture and director, but considering the combined Web, Blog, and IMDb metrics there is a slight preference for the movie Avatar to be this year's best picture winner - Hurt Locker is very close though. Director category discussion sees Kathryn Bigelow receiving the award while James Cameron is put second here. In actors it looks like Jeff Bridges pretty much made the race, however in actresses it is not completely clear yet who will cross the finish line first - though Meryl Streep has a slight advantage. Let us look back at this once the Awards have been given out!

These days Forbes again published sport’s top earning athletes. In spite of his transgressions, Tiger Woods still leads the pack with $64 million, followed by soccer player David Beckham ($18 million), tennis star Roger Federer ($16 million), Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt ($14 million) and basket ball players LeBron James ($13 million) and Kobe Bryant ($12 million).
I was curious to see if Web buzz and valuation of a player's attractiveness for corporate marketing executives from Nike, Addidas, Reebook and the like had any correlation. The two pictures below show the Web buzz share of five of the six athletes (I skipped the Nascar driver):

And the blog buzz share:

As the pictures show, the ranking at the top corresponds nicely. Tiger Woods is lonely at the top both on the Web and on blogs, but then there are some interesting differences. Kobe Bryant has more than his share on Web buzz compared to what corporate marketers paid for him, which means they got a good deal considering his high Web popularity. David Beckham, on the other hand, seems somewhat overpriced considering that he commands only 16% Blog and 20% Web buzz, well behind Roger Federer’s 21% and 25%. The conclusion: invest into the Swiss, he seems on the rise right now, at least as far as Web and Blog buzz goes.

Oscar Night is getting closer. On Tuesday Hollywood announced this year’s official nominees of the 82nd Academy Awards. As previously posted on this blog we are running our own Oscar predictions based on buzz in the Oscar forum on imdb.com and Web and Blog buzz analysis. Our latest results presented here were calculated on January 5th 2010 which is over one month before the nominations were released. In our analysis we focus on four categories, best picture, best director, best actress, and best actor.
The following table for best picture shows the results of our Oscar-Coolhunting four weeks ago. We computed an Oscar Index for every movie. This index consists of combined Web-, blog-, and message board – buzz and can be interpreted as the relative probability of a movie to receive an Academy Award on March 7th. Our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says (in a forum or blog) with her/his influence.


Our top 4 ranked movies correspond very well with the most promising nominations. Hurt Locker, Precious, Avatar, and Inglourious Basterds are head-to-head and clearly leading in our Coolhunting study. The following table nicely shows that these four blockbusters including the film with George Clooney – Up in the Air – also received the most nominations this year.


This year’s nominees for best directing match perfectly with our five candidates predicted through analyzing Web buzz. Kathryn Bigelow and Quentin Tarantino have a decent lead in our ranking. James Cameron with Avatar, however, will definitely be in the game when it comes to the showdown on Oscar Night.


Our predictions in the category for best actress illustrate a clear lead for Meryl Streep (30%) for her performance in Julie & Julia. Hollywood newcomer Gabby Sidibe playing a great role in the drama Precious was also on our list four weeks ago. We are missing Sandra Bullock and Helen Mirren.


The race for best actor in a leading role 2010 is much more competitive and no clear favorite could be identified in the run-up to the awards ceremony. George Clooney is definitely in a favorite position however Jeff Bridges seems to be in good shape this year. Unfortunately, we could not anticipate this at an early stage.


We are very excited to see who actually will win the Oscars on March 7th 2010. We will definitely stay tuned and provide updates as soon as we have new results.
Apropos, since the hype about the Academy Awards all around the globe is always very high we were recorded in our Coolhunting by Swiss TV in January. They will broadcast our story in the show “Einstein” prior to Oscar Night.

The race to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant senatorial seat in Washington has turned into a real shocker. At the outset, it seemed clear that in deeply democratic Massachusetts only a Democrat could become the next senator. As of today, it seems to be the other way. Republican candidate Scott Brown is ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley by 5 points.

I wanted to know what the Web would tell us. The picture below shows the daily betweenness values of the two candidates, we can cleary see how Scott Brown is gaining on Martha Coakley.

It seems however, that there is a silver lining for Ms. Coakley, at least in the blogosphere.
The next picture shows her centrality as of today (January 15). She is ahead by 6 percentage points.

The last picture, just for fun, shows the Blogpost-Network leading to the percentages. The red dots are the Web sites promoting both candidates. The brown dots promote Mr Brown, but it seems that the green (should really be blue) Web sites carry some more weight, leading to Martha Coakley's slight lead.

Let's wait until January 19, then we will know for sure.

Why do people collaboratively engage in innovative tasks? What’s the motivation to work together to develop something new? After all, if I do everything by myself, I will reap all the rewards for myself, and don’t have to share. Nevertheless, humans are the most social species of all, and progress is only possible by collectively creating new things “standing on the shoulders of giants”, by learning from what others have done, and apply it in novel ways.

According to my colleagues at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Tom Malone, Rob Laubacher, and Chris Dellarocas there are three main reasons why people engage in collective intelligence systems:
Money – financial gain is a strong motivator for people participating in markets and traditional organizations, either for direct payment, or for future payment, e.g. acquiring new skills.
Glory – getting recognition and building up a reputation can be an important motivator.
Love – love can be an important motivator, be it because people intrinsically enjoy an activity, because they like to socialize with others, or because they feel they are contributing to a cause larger than themselves.

Randall Collins links together these motivators in his theory of interaction ritual chains. He extends Emile Durkheim’s concept of effervescence, the energy that groups of people experience when they are together at a sporting event, a rave, or a riot. For Collins the mechanisms that drive society are nothing but interaction rituals. Interaction rituals consist of 4 components:
1. the people need to be bodily present at the same place. Through mutual feedback they will charge up the situation with excitement and significance.
2. there needs to be a boundary that demarcates the insiders from the outsiders, giving insiders a feeling to be privileged.
3. all insiders have a shared focus of attention, by communicating this focus to each other they become mutually aware of this focus.
4. by experiencing 1 to 3, all participants share a “common mood or emotional experience”.

When these 4 components combine successfully, participants are infused with emotional energy, the feeling of excitement, achievement, and enthusiasm – in short they are happy! Applying the concept of interaction ritual chains to the above three motivators "money", "glory", and "love" means that "love" as experienced in ritual interaction chains is the key motivator at the core, glory and money are simply enablers to obtain "love". Just look at Tiger Woods, who used his money and glory to buy love.

What motivates scientists?
To explain how love is the main motivator for people interested in collaborative innovation, let’s look at what motivates scientists, people whose profession it is to innovate. At the outset, scientists are motivated mostly by glory: it’s all about publish or perish, i.e. getting one’s papers into highly-ranked journals, and then be quoted by others.
Swiss researchers Margrit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey - himself a highly-cited researcher - analyze the deficiencies of the current academic ranking system based on peer review and citation count. Currently academics are ranked first by how many papers they get into top-ranked scientific journals. The decision on which paper makes it into a journal is based on peer reviews. The second criterion of success is citation count of their paper, i.e. how many other researchers cite the papers in their own academic work. Unfortunately both of these ranking systems have serious deficiencies, even leading to what Frey calls “academic prostitution”: As has been shown repeatedly, peer reviews have very low to no correlation with future citation, and citation count by other authors is seriously biased towards authors choosing articles they quote to increase acceptance of their own papers. Frey therefore proposes to revise peer review and quote-based ranking to reward intrinsic motivation. After all intrinsic motivation is what usually gets young researchers started on their career path: factors such as curiosity, flow experience in a fascinating activity, self-image, compliance with civic virtues, social or professional norms. In other words, all factors based on love with what they do.
While scientists therefore make a good role model for people involved in collaborative innovation, there is an even better one, which has been tried and tested for well over a thousand years, and has been analyzed by the same Bruno S. Frey: Benedictine monasteries (recently profiled in NZZ).

Why monks are coolfarmers (c)
In a paper on management principles of monastic life, Katja Rost, Emil Inauen, Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey study corporate governance at 134 Benedictine Abbeys in Southern Germany and Switzerland with an average age of nearly 500 years per monastery. It turns out COIN members can learn a lot from the monks. Benedictine monks organize their monastic life around three pillars:
Self-management: normally monks choose their own abbots from among their own ranks. Among the democratically elected abbots, only 11% turned out to be incapable, while among the externally imposed abbots, 67% were judged bad leaders. The Benedictine monks also have a lot of say in daily monastic life: there is a democratically elected “executive board” working with the abbot, a “consilium” advising and supervising the executive board, and there is also the full “parliament” of all monks convening multiple times per year and making fundamental decisions.
Core value system: Benedictine monks adhere to core values such as fairness, justice, mutual respect, mutual agreement, and forgiveness. Monasteries invest a lot of time into carefully selecting their new brothers, which join brotherhood over a well-calibrated multi-step multi-year process. Spending a lot of time with older monks, the young learn core values by example from the old. Additional learning happens through institutionalized readings during the meals.
External control: All the Benedictine monasteries are members of the congregation, lead by the archabbot. A visitation committee from the congregation inspects each monastery every five years, checking financial and spiritual health, with focus on advice, not on control.
Daily life in the Benedictine monasteries is governed by core values instead of control. This autonomy and self-organization increase intrinsic motivation, leading to higher quality results. Comparing average lifetime of a monastery (500 years) with the lifetime of large companies, which rarely survive 50 years, monks easily beat company executives. Love, the main motivating factor in Benedictine abbeys, therefore again trumps money and glory as corporate motivator.

What motivates creativity?
So far it seems that “love” is the main motivating factor for collaborative innovation. So is there a difference between love-driven “good creativity” and “bad creativity”? Creativity defined as “creating new things by combining existing things and processes in novel ways that have not been done before" is neither good nor bad.
But thinking this through further raises the question if e.g. creating a new derivative product for a Wallstreet bank is creativity also. After all, the Wallstreet banker is applying existing thinking to a new area to create value – mostly for himself. And that’s why I think that this is NOT sustainable creativity. The Wallstreet banker is entirely extrinsically motivated – he does what he does to make a lot of money, preferably for himself. Enron employees were highly creative in trading energy options, and even more creative in gaming the Californian energy system – all to create value, towards the outside for Enron and its shareholders, in the end, however, it all boiled down to optimizing their own bonuses. As history has shown, this was not and will never be sustainable! For some time, Enron revenue and share price went up, all to come down with an ugly crash after a few years. All that Enron employees did, was create one heck of a Ponzi scheme. As it now turned out, the real estate bubble in the US, created by “genius traders” at Wallstreet, was just yet another Enron, only at a vastly larger scale.
Enron employees did not break the laws of the United States, what they broke is the laws of good and ethical behavior. The schemes the Enron employees cooked up might have been legal, but they ripped off the majority – all of the users of electricity, i.e. all of us, to the advantage of a tiny minority: firstly the shareholders of Enron, and more importantly, the inventors of the energy trading systems.
And that’s why free markets don’t work. The underlying premise of Adam Smith’s invisible hand is that if everybody is off to fend for himself, trading on an unrestricted market will make society at large to be better off also. Well, this would only be true if there were total transparency, and no law of the bell curve, i.e. of smarter people trying to profit from not-so-smart people. And that’s why I think that only collaborative innovation motivated by “love” leads to sustainable progress.

What is better: banker or monk?

March 7th, 2010, the 82nd Academy Awards, commonly known as Oscars, will be given out for best picture, for best actor and actress, and in 21 other categories.
Two years ago we successfully predicted who would win an Oscar Award, almost two months before the Awards were actually given out. This blog post contains our first predictions for the 2010 Oscars, more than three months before the Awards will be actually given out.

There are other places on the Web also making Oscar predictions, for example movie site moviefone and Internet betting site intrade:


While the above predictions are made by experts (moviefone) and people placing bets on the outcome (intrade), our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says with her/his influence.
Below are our combined coolhunting results, based on evaluating the buzz in the Oscar Forum in the Internet movie database imdb.com and on running queries for [moviename] & “Oscar 2010” on the Web and in Blogs.


The light blue bar in the above chart is based on the buzz in the Oscar forum in imdb.com (see table below)



The second half of the prediction in the bar chart above is based on the betweenness of the movies on the Web and on Blogs. To illustrate this approach, below is the Blog network for the query [moviename] & “Oscar 2010”. If we wanted to drill down and predict which Oscar a movie might get, for example “Best Picture”, we would rerun the query as [moviename] & “Oscar 2010 Best Picture”.



To resume, the top predictions as of November 30, 2009, are:
1. nine
2. 500 days of summer
3. julie & julia
4. precious
5. hurt locker
6. lovely bones
7. Up in the air

Here are the predictions for best actor/actress, based on the discussion in the Oscar forum on imdb.com:


Obviously, 2009 is not over yet as some films are only coming out in December, and so things might still change. We will rerun the calculations at the end of 2009 to get more accurate predictions.