COINS2015 was a great event in many ways. Takashi Iba told me about the conference last autumn while we were both at the PURPLSOC. As COINS2015 was planned to have many topics on patterns and innovation it was a natural fit to my interests. A very positive surprise to me, however, was the focus on network analysis to identify patterns of collaborative innovation (not design patterns). COINS was originally started by Peter Gloor, a research scientist of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT. Peter’s workshop on the network analysis software Condor was a real spark for me to experiment with it in the next semester.

This is the great value of conferences that bring together an abundance of people with different backgrounds. The 15-minute presentations have been kick-starters for my interest and I will report on some of the topics in the next weeks as I dig deeper into them.

As I had my own paper on “Collaboration tools and patterns for creative thinking” it was time to review available tools and apps for creative thinking. I will post on valuable tools and how they relate to patterns of creative thinking in this blog.

Applying the Idea Quota pattern (learn about it in my next post) I am planning to have at least 5 posts a week. Let’s see whether I keep up to it. Thanks to my trip to Japan I have already a long list of things (or is that “thinks”) in my mind.