Social networking and innovation is the subject of a Stanford Business School study that says "disparate information and its transmission are keys to innovation." Study author Martin Ruef says weak ties "allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources...." His research shows that "entrepreneurs who spend more time with a diverse network of strong and weak ties...are three times more likely to innovate than entrepreneurs stuck within a uniform network."

You may recall I posted before about how creative people have brains that are more open to outside stimuli (and are able to handle it, otherwise they would be creative but driven insane by the stimuli). So I'm not surprised to see this information.

I'm also reminded of a conversation I had with Andrew Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen. Hargadon calls 'innovation...a phenomenon of networks connected by 'technology brokers' - people or organizations that link isolated groups and industries to integrate previously unrelated viewpoints and technologies to resolve new problems."

It makes sense that innovative, entrepreneurial people would be those who see the value of weak social ties as a means of gathering, evaluating and sorting information about the world. This information, these social connections generate the stuff out of which inventive recombination happens.

Is there a social networking site out there yet that really taps into this? I've done Ryze, been invited to Friendster, been invited to orkut...but I haven't studied any of them all that closely. It would be interesting to see if there are specific features on any of these sites that make it possible for this kind of weak-tie networking, without pushing the social tie into a more explicit strong tie that's not as useful for entrepreneurship and innovation.