Being immersed in a social context, everyone has a number of people to turn to when needing to discuss an idea or when a problem arises. These people represent a Social Capital that everyone can spend for his own benefit. A number of academic literature substantiates that, if used correctly, Social Capital can help improve the performance of a company by providing information and resources.
In order to represent this idea in a simple and concrete way, we have used a concept specifically developed for this workshop, NETS. A net is a way to visualise networks in action and it can be defined as the sub-set of contacts that are activated to carry-out a specific task. This can be solving a manufacturing problem, launching a new product or finding new ideas. Through visualising your network and the nets hidden in it, you can plan strategically your actions.
We suggest you try this with your company: maybe one of your contacts is the missing link to developing a project your company has long considering.
Leon Cruickshank
Lorenz Herfurth
Roger Whitham
Daniela Sangiorgi