What’s the buzz?

We're building an 18,000 state-of-the-art Venture Development Center, designed for collaborative innovation. The new space, opening in fall 2008, is designed to be a beehive, where creative researchers from every corner of the university explore, develop and test ideas.

We were inspired by Peter Gloor's book "Swarm Creativity." (Peter Gloor is a research scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he leads a project exploring collaborative innovation networks.) We see our role as instigators of swarms. After all, swarms are productive because each team member knows intuitively what she or he needs to do. The guiding principle of the swarm is not to become rich, but to create real value for the swarm.

In every large organization, groups of creative individuals self-organize to explore and develop ideas that they care deeply about. These swarms are crucial for organizations to succeed in this emerging era of increased collaboration among innovators both inside and outside the organization. This is the very essence of doing business in Venture Development Center.