Review: Gloor & Cooper's Collhunting

Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing
by Peter Gloor & Scott Cooper

The book is about spotting trends, examples of how some trends were spotted, how to apply techniques for better trend spotting, and how to exploit trends. The authors use a wide variety of case studies, and a broad survey of literature throughout the book. The book also offers some brief description of futures and prediction markets. Collaborative Innovation Networks or COINs are discussed throughout the book. Brief domain information is introduced from other well-known business sources to help the reader understand the influence of swarms on the currently-understood business models.

Both authors are associated with the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The target reader is anyone who is interested in trends, human herds/swarms, crowd mentality and tapping into the trend.



The Book Content:

1. Why "Cool" Matters

• Cool things are things that are fun and make the word a better place in some way.
• A component of cool is to act for the benefit of others.
• Finding cool trends is beneficial to business.
• Early adopters influence social opinion the most.
• Social Network Analysis can be used for coolhunting if interactions of large groups become predictable

2. Swarm Creativity Creates Cool Trends

• "COINs are cyberteams of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal - an innovation - by sharing ideas, information, and work.", page 23
• COINs self-organize, select their own leader, swarms split to work in different areas, give power away without becoming powerless, the more knowledgeable share with less knowledgeable (beehive analogy)

3. Swarms can Better Predict the Future

• Prediction Markets use collective intelligence to present probabilities of future events happening
• Prediction markets need enough participants to be meaningful, the collection of results must be statistically useful, and it helps if the participants take them seriously.
• Short Iowa Political Markets, HP Sales Market, Siemens Project Market, Hollywood Stock Exchange, Rite-Solutions' Mutual Fun, case studies
• Peer networks can act like prediction markets to a certain extent

4. About Trendsetters

• Cool people start cool trends.
• Henry Oldenburg, Ben Franklin, Ted Nelson mini-biography.
• "Trendsetters are galaxies not stars"

5. Coolhunters look for Coolfarmers

• Coolhunting and Coolfarming are the two main ways of finding new trends and trendsetters.
• The process of how ideas turn into trends follows invention, creation and selling
• The four principles of Coolfarming are: gain power by giving it away, seed community with idea, mandate intrinsic motivation, recruit trendsetters
• Swarm creativity depends on communication, committment and collaboration

6. When Swarms go Mad

• Quote from Charles Makay's Extraordinary Polular Delusions ...
• Swarms can also be wrong
• Use Coolhunting techniques to find madness: lack of open communication, lack of a culture of collaboration, lack of membership freedom

7. Do-It-Yourself Coolhunting with Technology

• Meme detection services like memeorandum, wesmirch.com, digg and del.ic.us help the coolhunter find trends
• Slashdot.org is a good place for tech trends
• Physical proximity can occasion swarming, while distanced members need tools for good communication and collaboration

8. Coolhunting by Automated Social Network Analysis

• TeCFlow creates dynamic graphics of relationships for semantic interactions from logs, emails, forums
• Analyzing Wikinews, eCoustics, Mobile Phones in High School, Enron, Oceancontrol.

9. Five Steps to Becoming a Coolfarmer

1. Learn about COINs
2. Form a COIN
3. Coolhunt with your COIN in a community
4. Analyze information flow on your team and member roles
5. Optimize your own role in your COIN to become a coolfarmer

10. The Coming World of Swarm Creativity

• Starbucks, IBM, Cisco examples
• Old-World company versus New-World company dichotomy
• Summary: immerse yourself in the swarm, listen to the swarm, trust the swarm, share with the swarm

My Opinion: Great book. Worth reading twice ... carefully! Lot's of good material to build procedures, guides, rules and process out of. Plus there was a lot of information that leads me to begin branching out and learning in some new directions. Lots of good ideas for an entreprenuer and innovator.

The book would have benefitted from a little more hard connections to the outside world and where to begin . They basically suggest Yahoo groups (lol) as a community. It's not that I believe they don't know. I think they do. They just apparently did not want to share, which is a no-no for a COIN member. This book did use Starbucks as a case study which is overused in most of the business books I read, so I can't say it's a perfect book. But it is pletty close. (One other qualm regarding an example .. RADAR was not discovered by the US Naval Laboratory, but demonstrated by Christian Huelsmeyer some 18 years earlier.)