The February edition of Harvard Business Review has a list of “breakthrough ideas for 2007.”

While it might be a little early to declare, the entry is co-written by some of the world’s leading thinkers. It covers everything from health care to nanotechnology and many of the ideas graze our own backyard of open source media.

So, I’ve taken the liberty to break down some of the more on topic entries from their full list of 20 ideas.

1. The Accidental Influentials — written by Duncan J. Watts.

“In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well connected. The idea is intuitively compelling—we think we see it happening all the time—but it doesn’t explain how ideas actually spread…The principal requirement for what we call “global cascades”—the widespread propagation of influence through networks—is the presence not of a few influentials but, rather, of a critical mass.

Perhaps this critical mass phenomena has never been so transparent – leading to the assumption that “influentials” were behind the spread of ideas. But in a connected world we find that “regardless of how influential an individual is locally, he or she can exert global influence only if this critical mass is available to propagate a chain reaction.”

2. Algorithems in the Attic — written by Michael Schrage

Think of this idea as recycling ancient math equations.

“As computing gets ever faster and cheaper, yesterday’s abstruse equations are becoming platforms for tomorrow’s breakthroughs… Google’s search engine was possible only because the founders adapted a century-old theorem about matrices to software for ranking Web pages according to links from other sites. Networks like the Web can be expressed as matrices, and a relatively simple calculation gives a ranking of how well each site is connected to the rest of the Web. That formula for automatic ranking—which could be understood and appreciated without a PhD—is one of the most lucrative algorithms ever. The math was there for the taking.”

And you thought long division was useless. The potential for disruptive opportunities are everywhere.

3. An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation — written by You! (just kidding, credit for this entry goes to Eric von Hippel).

“A major auto company recently presented its “innovation road map” for the next ten years to a group of journalists and car enthusiasts. As the presentation progressed, it became increasingly clear that some members of the audience were restless. Finally, one listener stood up and said, “Many of us have already built and installed every single one of the innovations you say you are planning to develop in the next ten years. Wake up and smell the coffee! Come out to the parking lot and take a look at what we have developed and installed in our cars!”

Most of Von Hippel’s analysis focuses on the business side of things — research and development. But, call me crazy, perhaps this hole “user-generated content” thing might be useful in journalism too?

4. Innovation and Growth: Size Matters — written by Geoffrey B. West.

Okay, this one is a doozy. Stay with me. The pay-off is worth it.

In biology scientists have found a “power-law scalling relationship,” which says that the fundamental characteristics of lifeforms, such as energy and resource use, genome length and life span, are governed by simple mathematical rules for all biological creatures, from bacteria to whales.

“Put simply, the scaling law says that if an organism’s mass increases by a factor of 10,000 (four orders of magnitude), its metabolic rate will increase by a factor of only 1,000 (three orders of magnitude). This represents an enormous economy of scale: the bigger the creature, the less energy per pound it requires to stay alive.”

Geoffrey B. West and her cohorts studied social organizations (cities and companies) – which also consume energy and resources, depend on networks for the flow of information and materials, and produce artifacts and waste.

And they found a new scalling pattern. “When we examined quantities that are essentially social in nature and have no simple analogue in biology—…They include patent activity, number of supercreative people, wages, and GDP. For such quantities the exponent (the analogue of 3⁄4 in metabolic rate) exceeds 1, clustering around a common value of 1.2. Thus, a doubling of population is accompanied by more than a doubling of creative and economic output. We call this phenomenon “superlinear” scaling: by almost any measure, the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.

I also could have stated this simply as “more heads are better than few,” but wasn’t that an interesting chain of thought to follow? Now I ask you — how large can a community get on the Internet?

The next sentence in her article says “Organismic growth, constrained by sublinear power-law scaling derived from the dynamics of biological networks, ultimately ceases, with the equations predicting what size organisms will reach.” I, of course, understand this perfectly. But will leave it up to you for a summary on that.

5. The Best Networks Are Really Worknets — written by Christopher Meyer

“It’s too early for a general theory of human networks, but some practical guidelines have emerged from the first few years of experience. Fundamentally, the key to getting payback on investment in a network is to think hard about exactly what kind of value you want the network to create. In other words, you must put the work in “network” first…Because networks perform diverse functions, they require diverse forms. By first defining the most important work you want your network to perform—scan, solve, innovate, influence, or allocate—you’ll be able to design your “worknet.”

Most intriguing to me and anyone else looking to build a social network with a goal: “In classic “build it and they will come” fashion, networks are launched as technology-led platforms and come to be populated by arbitrary collections of people. Some members linger and some leave, depending on how they perceive the benefits. In rare cases, value emerges for the network’s host. Even more rarely, it’s value of the kind that was sought. The odds of getting that value from a network are exponentially higher when you put the work first.”

6. In Defense of “Ready, Fire, Aim” — written by Clay Shirky.

When I first began reading this, I thought Shirky had lost it. As I continued, I realized that I am still a young Padawan and have much to learn from the open source Jedi Masters.

The world’s largest open source site, Sourceforge, hosts more than 100,000 projects, and its most popular software is downloaded tens of thousands of times daily. But most projects have never broken a hundred downloads, and more than half are simply inactive: A project was proposed, but nothing happened.

If the vast majority of open source projects are failures, has the press been wrong to emphasize the movement’s few successes? The answer is—obviously and measurably—yes. So can businesses that face seemingly formidable competition from existing or future open systems breathe easy? Absolutely not. Open systems are a profound threat not only because they outsucceed commercial firms but also because they outfail them. They grow not in spite of failure but because of it.

The same logic could be applied to blogging. There are 55-million blogs out there. Most are not reaching a mass audience – but that doesn’t mean mainstream media shouldn’t be afraid. Those “failures” (if we have to label them such) don’t stop anyone else from clacking away at the keyboard.

Check out the full list — there are 14 other influential ideas that weren’t broken down here.

———

David Cohn is editor of NewAssignment.Net’s blog