The Power of Alumni Networks - Success of Startup Companies Correlates With Online Social Network Structure of Its Founders

In this paper we analyze the success of startups in Germany by looking at the social network structure of their founders on the German-language business-networking site XING. We address two related research questions. First we examine university-wide networks, constructing alumni networks of 12 German universities, with the goal of identifying the most successful founder networks among the 12 universities. Second, we also look at individual actor network structure, to find the social network attributes of the most successful founders. We automatically collected the publicly accessible portion of XING, filtering people by attributes indicative of their university, and roles as founders, entrepreneurs, and CEOs. We identified 51,976 alumni, out of which 14,854 have entrepreneurship attributes. We also manually evaluated the financial success of a subsample of 80 entrepreneurs for each university. We found that universities, which are more central in the German university network, provide a better environment for students to found more and more successful startups. University networks whose alumni have a stronger “old-boys-network”, i.e. a larger share of their links with other alumni of their alma mater, are more successful as founders of startups. On the individual level the same holds true: the more links founders have with alumni of their university, the more successful their startup is. Finally, the absolute amount of networking matters, i.e. the more links entrepreneurs have, and the higher their betweenness in the online network of university alumni, the more successful they are

“Only Say Something When You Have Something to Say”: Identifying Creatives Through Their Communication Patterns

We study the communication patterns of particularly creative people in the R&D department of a global energy firm through their e-mail communication. We find that the most creative staff members, measured through patents, publications, and awards, are less central in the full corporate network, but more responsive and responded to, which we take as a proxy for passion and respect

Designing Networks for Innovation and Improvisation - Proceedings of the 6th International COINs Conference

This volume is focused on the emerging concept of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). COINs are at the core of collaborative knowledge networks, distributed communities taking advantage of the wide connectivity and the support of communication technologies, spanning beyond the organizational perimeter of companies on a global scale. It includes the refereed conference papers from the 6th International Conference on COINs, June 8-11, 2016, in Rome, Italy. It includes papers for both application areas of COINs, (1) optimizing organizational creativity and performance, and (2) discovering and predicting new trends by identifying COINs on the Web through online social media analysis. Papers at COINs16 combine a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration, and intercultural analysis through the lens of online social media. They will cover most recent advances in areas from leadership and collaboration, trend prediction and data mining, to social competence and Internet communication