A Self‐organizing System for Innovation in Large Organizations

Abstract

Technological innovation is almost certainly the key driver of long‐term economic growth. Yet for many years, not only have discoveries depended on serendipity and happenstance but also selection and development of the innovations has been managed by over‐centralized bureaucracies that are more concerned with stability and error reduction than with adaptation to a changing world. This paper uses bee swarm logic to suggest a different way forward. The novel system proposed would consist of a designed collective intelligence platform co‐ordinating the work of a number of competing, self‐organizing research groups, each using evolutionary algorithms to optimize their potential solution to a given innovation problem. Each research group would compete to recruit supporters in strict proportion to the independently estimated profitability of its solution. The first solution to accumulate a quorum level of support would win the competition, and its supporters would then be able to develop the solution through implementation. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.