seminar: The organization of innovation: competence networks, generative relationships, scaffolding structures

speaker: David Lane (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia)

abstract: Perhaps the most surprising feature of social organization is its capacity both to support current functionality and to introduce new functionality and integrate it into ongoing patterns of social interaction. I will argue that interactions between agents that are in some sense co-located are essential for understanding how this capacity works. First, I introduce a way of thinking about social organization as a multilevel system of agents interacting in competence networks, which are generated, maintained and renewed by what I call scaffolding structures. Next, I identify different senses in which agents embedded in such a system can be near to one another, and which interactions among nearby agents count as local. Then, I identify a particular kind of relationship among agents that I call generative, which I claim is the site of new attributions of functionality, the key to innovation. Actions directed towards realizing such new attributions may induce cascades of changes in social organization and the competences this organization supports. Scaffolding structures play a critical role in channeling these cascades towards what the agents that interact in and through these structures regard as socially useful directions.

timetable:
Thu 18 Nov, 10:30 - 11:00, Aula Mancini
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