It’s the ties that bind …

HBS: Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degress World of Inventors“Perhaps most importantly, our work and more recent work on knowledge diffusion demonstrates that knowledge flows along these collaborative relationships, even years after they were formed. For managers the critical message here is, the world of inventors is getting ‘smaller’ in the sense that inventors are more connected to their colleagues in outside firms, and that knowledge is diffusing in both directions. So with regard to agglomeration and connection, the world of inventors is indeed shrinking and becoming a ‘smaller world.”