McKinsey has a very interesting take on how communities including networks of individuals and organizations are being assembled to create new products. They talk about a "Creation Net", where hundreds or thousands of  individuals and organizations (participants) from very diverse settings participate and collaborate in creating "new knowledge, to learn from one another, and to appropriate and build on one another's work". Sounds very much like how the Open Source movement and Linux, in particular, was developed.

While theMcKinsey paper focuses on using Creation Nets to create physical products, it also sets the ground rules for how these rather loosely constructed networks can collaborate and benefit both in the commercial sense and in product development.

I particularly like the 4 management approaches. This gives us a clue on how ArrowHand is also likely to function and thrive:

1. Choose appropriate ways to coordinate the activities of the network
2. Balance local innovation with "global" integration
3. Desig effective action points
4. Establish useful performance feedback loops

I hope to expand on each of these approaches in future blog entries. Each approach on its own deserves an in-depth discussion.