Networking yet?

One of the keys to the innovation process is your personal network, or people with whom you have direct, personal, and open contact. As an innovation manager you must guarantee that your employees have access to a very broad, diverse and growing network of people. Please read Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg, by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell describes (in a fun way) how informal network contacts most often provide the linkages necessary to bring forth new ideas, and provide the resources needed for success.

In summary:

Each of us has contacts, and each contact has other contacts. Contacts tend toward insular groupings, such as your poker club, Sunday School class or coworkers. All members are familiar with one another within a group. However, it is likely that members of one group do not know the members of the other groups. In this case you are the "linkage" between groups. It is precisely these "linkages" who bring innovation and growth because they tie together different people, skills, experiences, products, services, thoughts and ideas. Your assignment, should you accept it, is to meet as many linkages as possible. You don't have to know everyone within a group. You just have to know someone who does. Here is a diagram:

Networking is a way of life. Without it innovation cannot exist.

Now, what images come to mind when you think of the word "networking"?

• Politicians gladhanding voters and kissing babies
• Phone calls from relatives selling Amway
• Job fairs in which everyone needs a job, but no one has one to give

Networking should be as natural as shaking hands and remembering names. The challenge for many of us is to get out of our existing groups and meet other people. The key to networking is to meet as diverse a group as possible. Afterall, your network is not valuable if everyone knows everyone else.

Another tip is to keep a list of people you meet - name, occupation, location, phone number, email, contacts, and whatever else you can scrape off. This will prove invaluable later on.