George Pór

1982 was an early year in the knowledge explosion in my domain, organizational transformation. Books, conferences, schools of thoughts were rapidly multiplying, and I realized, to create the best value for my clients, I have to team up with other organizational professionals and participate in ongoing communities of knowledge sharing. 1982 was also the year when I got my first Apple II computer, a modem, and started discovering the joy of personal/professional networking and online facilitation, using the early, text-only conferencing systems.

A few years later, I established a consultancy, Community Intelligence Labs (CoIL), and wrote a paper on “The Quest for Collective Intelligence,” in which I outlined the "nervous system model" of infrastructure design for augmenting collective intelligence. It was published in Community Building: Renewing Spirit and Learning in Business. (New Leaders Press, 1995) I've recently a completed a one and half year stay at INSEAD as Visiting Senior Research Fellow. During that time, I developed a highly customizable methodology for a virtual Collaboration Campus and had a chance to test and refine it in various organizational contexts, including a project funded by the European Commission.

My research interest is quite broad; it is driven by a fundamental curiosity about the dynamic interplay of emergent processes in and across four domains of innovation:

• SOCIAL innovation
• BUSINESS innovation
• KNOWLEDGE innovation
• TECHNICAL innovation

I believe any complex project or enterprise will succeed more esasily if it integrates 3 or 4 of these innovations. Pushing simultaneously the edges of the Four Innovations, they may reach higher synergy, using better the free energy of evolution working for them. That's the context which has been informing the specific research questions that I worked on in the past 20 years, and have an ongoing interest in.