Thursday 9 February 2012

The Benefits of a Network

Networks in basic form are individuals with a mutual interest that come together to change ideas, products or services. Networks use the collaborative potential of a whole crowd of brains working together as a single organism to determine an outcome, they harness the power of many 'the wisdom of crowds'. In network diagrams (as previously show) people are drawn as nodes, the more nodes the more information and the more powerful a network becomes. The individuals within a network may not be wholly correct but the sum total of a group will always bring you closer to the correct answer. For example in Who Wants to be a Millionaire when asking a friend 61 per cent of contestants get the correct answer but when asking the audience 91 per cent get the correct resulting answer. If harnessed correctly networks can be used to extract more accurate answers from people working collectively rather than individually, even if they are not known to each other. In fact the less individuals know each other the more beneficial they are to your network.

Raymond Martin, 2010. Trend Forecaster's Handbook. Edition. Laurence King Publishers.

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