Pentland - Social physics: how good ideas spread-the lessons from a new science

I live in the future. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I work, is at the center of the innovation universe; virtually any new idea or technology in the world travels through MIT before it shows up on the world stage. MIT is also part of the densest collection of start-up companies in the world (although Silicon Valley is larger). Moreover, the MIT Media Lab, my intellectual home, is probably the worlds foremost place to live the future. For instance, fifteen years ago I ran the worlds first cyborg collective, in which everyone lived and worked with wirelessly connected computers on their bodies and computer displays in their glasses. Many of these ideas eventually find their way out into the world; my former students now lead cutting-edge commercial projects such as Google Glass (glasses with computer screens built in) and Google+ (the worlds second-largest social network).

My privileged position has given me a unique opportunity to see firsthand how creative cultures can harvest new ideas, help them survive and grow, and finally, turn them into practical reality. Perhaps more important, I have also gotten to see how creative cultures must change in order to thrive in the hyperconnected, warp-speed world that is MIT, an environment that the rest of the world is now entering.

What I have learned from these experiences is that many of the traditional ideas we have about ourselves and how society works are wrong. It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.

These ideas are central to the success of the Media Lab, my research group, and to the entrepreneurship program that I direct. I dont teach traditional classes; instead, I bring in visitors with new ideas and get people to interact with others who are on the same journey. When I was academic head of the Media Lab I pushed to get rid of traditional grading; instead, we have tried to grow a community of peers where respect and collaboration on real-world projects is the currency of success and further opportunity. We live in social networks, not in the classroom or laboratory.

The origins of this book are a sharp clash of cultures between how I do things at the Media Lab and how things are done elsewhere in the world. For example, when I created the Media Lab Asia as a distributed organization across several universities in India, one of the biggest problems I encountered was that researchers at each university were isolated from one another and therefore their research was stagnant and unproductive. People working in the same field, and sometimes even at the same university, had literally never met each other because the university administrators and the funding agencies thought it was sufficient to have the researchers read each others papers and that they didnt need to travel to meetings or conferences. It was only when they began to meet and spend informal time together that new ideas began to bubble up and new ways of approaching problems began to spread.

I have seen the same lack of understanding in many senior government leaders and CEOs of multinational companies in my role at the World Economic Forum, where I have co-led hyperconnected world discussions that seek solutions to the challenges posed by big data and specifically the uncontrolled spread of private personal information. It has become clear to me that there is a huge difference between the way most world leaders and CEOs think about innovation and collective action and the examples I see from my perch at MIT. Most people think in relatively static terms, such as competition, rules, and (sometimes) complexity. I think in more dynamic, evolutionary terms, paying attention to the flow of ideas within networks, the creation of social norms, and the processes that generate complexity. Most people think about using a framework centered on the individual and the eventual steady-state outcome, whereas I think in terms of social physics: growth processes within networks.

To understand this difference in thinking, I began a decade-long research program to develop a rigorous intellectual framework that extends current individual-centric economic and policy thinking by including social interactions. It posits social learning and social pressure as primary forces that drive the evolution of culture and govern much of the hyperconnected world. This research program has been surprisingly successful from an academic perspective, with each part of the social physics framework being mapped out in papers published in the worlds most selective scientific journals. My expectation is that these papers will provide additional depth to the fields of complexity and network science, as well as provide a new view on evolutionary dynamics.

But as we all know, academic papers are, well, academic. So Ive also helped move these ideas out into the real world, creating half a dozen start-up companies that use them to help firms become more productive and creative, to make the mobile social Web smarter, to make it possible for the average person to be a successful investor, and to help support the social and mental health of our society. Again, these real-world endeavors have been surprisingly successful, in no small part because of the talented and visionary former students who have become the CEOs of these companies.