I’m buried in work at the moment, but I ran across this today via Venessa Miemis‘ twitter feed and thought I should share it – Towards a New Literacy in Cooperation in Business, put out by the Institute for the Future.

The summary paragraph on the page that I’ve linked to doesn’t do the report justice. It is a very nice discussion of the need for cooperation in business, and the impact that cooperation is having. In practical terms, that means that they are taking a lot of the hot topics of the day like open source software, collaborative innovation, aggregating internet strategies and distributed production/innovation and making very useful strategic recommendations for how to integrate these ideas into your own strategy.

Here’s what they say about networks:

Assigning value to social connectivity. Network mathematics provides a way to analyze
and evaluate the value of social connectivity of an individual or organization. As we’ll discover when we look at the catalysis lens, the new technologies of cooperation include systems to support affiliate networks and track their reach both within an organization and outside it. Interpreted through network math, this data could become the basis of auditing individual and group cooperative behavior and even valuing entire companies.

The report then follows up with a number of actionable recommendations. It’s well worth taking a look at if you’ve been curious about how to make sense of these cooperative trends.