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The ties that find

Andrew McAfee has written about the value of weak ties, as part of a business case for enterprise 2.0. To quote:

Granovetters' great insight in SWT and later work was that these activities help strengthen already strong ties, but that weak ties might actually be the more important ones for innovation and knowledge sharing. Strong ties and weak ties are exactly what they sound like. Strong ties between people arise from long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions; weak ties from infrequent and more casual ones. The 'problem' with strong ties is that if persons A and B have a strong tie, they’re also likely to be strongly tied to all members of each other's networks. In other words, there’s likely to be a lot of overlap in their friendship circles.

Posted by jamesr on October 02, 2007 11:06 AM
Categories: Enterprise 2.0