Peter A. Gloor is a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT's Sloan School of Management where he leads a project exploring Collaborative Innovation Networks. He was Mercator Visiting Professor at the University of Cologne, and is a lecturer at Helsinki University of Technology. Earlier, Peter was a Senior Research Fellow at the Dartmouth Tuck Center for Digital Strategies and an adjunct faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Zurich in 1989.
Peter is equally at home in the commercial world. He is founder and Chief Creative Officer of software startup galaxyadvisors. Until the end of 2002, Peter was a Partner with Deloitte Consulting, leading its E-Business practice for Europe. Before that, he was a Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Section Leader for Software Engineering at Union Bank of Switzerland. His latest books, Swarm Creativity - Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks , and Coolhunting - Chasing DownThe Next Big Thing (together with Scott Cooper) were published in 2006 by Oxford University Press and spring 2007 by AMACOM, respectively. He blogs about Swarm Creativity.
Nov 19th, 2009
Keynote at SFEM Swiss Forum for Educational Media
Kollaboration in Innovationsnetzwerken durch Schwarmkreativitaet
Berne, Switzerland
Oct 19th, 2009
Featured Talk at Innovation Immersion
Crowd-Sourcing, Cool Hunting & Cool Farming: Leveraging Swarm Creativity to Bring New Trends
Over the Tipping Point
La Jolla, CA
Sept 29th, 2009
Keynote at Internet Summit Austria
Coolhunting durch Schwarmkreativität:Frühzeitiges Erkennen von Trends durch Soziale Netzwerkanalyse auf dem Web
Vienna, Austria
Aug 28th, 2009
Workshop at European Forum Alpbach
Part of the Technology Forum: Working Group 07: Creative industries vs. old economy: where is the economy headed? more...
Alpbach, Austria
Aug 8th, 2009
Workshop at the 2009 Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Reality Mining: Using Sociometric Badges for Automated Behavioral Data Collection. with Ben Waber, Lynn Wu, Sandy Pentland, Sinan Aral, David Lazer, and Erik Brynjolfsson more...
Chicago, Illinois
June 28th, 2009
Improving Health Care Delivery: The Role of Collaborative Social Networks
Panel presentation at AcademyHealth, Chicago. more...
June 24/25th, 2009
What is the Innovation Quotient of you and your team and how can you change it
An examination of how communication patterns, connectivity and sharing determine the innovation quotient of individuals and organisations, with examples in Financial Services and lessons in star-gazing, galactic journeys and a spot of waggle-dancing
Amplify, Sydney, Australia
June 17th, 2009
Dynamic Social Network Analysis with Condor
How to optimize the flow of knowledge in organizations through dynamic social network analysis
Swiss IT Leadership Forum, Cannes
June 9th, 2009
Von Hypermedia zu Collective Intelligence
RINGVORLESUNG "HAPPY FRONT END" #5: Peter Gloors Vortrag schlägt einen Bogen von den Anfängen des Webs bis hin zu "Predictive User Interfaces", die auf sozialer Netzwerkanalyse basieren...
Merz Akademie, Stuttgart
May 28th, 2009
Online Lecture at University of Amsterdam
Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity. Video and synchronized slides of a 90 minutes virtual talk at University of Amsterdam
May 4th, 2009
Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity
Keynote at the 5th EduMedia Conference 2009: Creativity and Innovation Competencies in the Web "e-creativity and e-innovation", Salzburg, Austria
April 6th, 2009
Coolhunting und Coolfarming durch Dynamische Soziale Netzwerkanalyse mit Condor
Comptuer Science Seminar, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, Hochschule für Technik
April 3rd, 2009
Coolhunting - Chasing down the next big thing
Closing Plenary on Coolhunting - Ueber das Aufspueren von Collaborativen Innovationsnetzwerken, an der CRM 2009: 10. Jahrestagung Customer Relationship Management, Balance Resort Stegersbach, Austria
March 31th, 2009 11.50am
Transfer Transparent: Coolhunting durch Schwarmkreativität
Coolhunting bezeichnet systematisches Aufspüren von kommenden Trends und Trendsettern mittels sozialer Netzwerkanalyse. Mit Hilfe des am MIT entwickelten und nun an der FHNW/Technopark Aargau zur Produktreife gefuehrten webbasierten Tools Condor können kollaborative Innovationsnetzwerke im Web, in Blogs und in online Foren erkannt und visualisiert werden.....(mit Jonas Krauss und Stefan Nann, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Brugg)
February, 2009
Nature article on "Secret Signals"
Mark Buchanan talks about Sandy Pentland's work on sociometric badges, and also profiles my work on patterns of creative individuals and teams.
January 26th, 2009 6pm
Visualizing Social Networks to Discover Trends and Trendsetters
Indiana University, Bloomington: Network and Complex Systems Talk
This talk introduces Condor, a tool for dynamic semantic social network analysis, which has been developed for the last six years...
January 13th to 15th, 2009 (3-6pm)
Short Course at MIT "Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity"
As part of MIT's IAP (independent activities period), discover what’s going to be cool—before everyone else.
In this course you will find out how to:
- discover cool trends for your field through Social Network Analysis by tapping into the collective intelligence of your potential customers (coolhunting)
- find the trendsetters who convert an innovation into a trend
- take the new trends you find and develop their business value (coolfarming)
Read more...
November 4th, 2008
Election Night at Swiss Residence in Lexington, MA 
Organized in partnership with L'Hebdo (a Swiss weekly newspaper), the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, and the Forum
of 100 outstanding personalities from the French part of Switzerland, the election night at the newly decorated Swiss residence
in Lexington gathered around 100 people. Using a social networking tool analyzing blogs and sentiment on the web, Swiss
scientist Peter Gloor presented in realtime what people think about Obama and McCain in the blogosphere.
Read more...
November 2nd, 2008
USC Annenberg "Collaborative innovation networks: Coolhunting through swarmcreativity"
Join students and faculty for a presentation by Peter A. Gloor, Visiting Scholar and Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Read more...
November 2008
Internet Trend Research 
Wer wird US-Präsident? Wie entwickeln sich die Aktienkurse? Welcher Film gewinnt einen Oscar? Ein Schweizer Informatiker gibt die Antwort
- dank einer Software, mit der er die Kommunikationsströme im Internet analysiert.
Read more...
October 2008
Wisdom of Crowds 
Jeder möchte wissen, was die Zukunft bringt. "Wir wissen es", verspricht Peter Gloor. Denn seine Software für die Analyse
sozialer Netzwerke sagte schon politische Wahlen und Oscar-Preisträger voraus. Jetzt
ist der Unternehmer und Forscher, der sich seit 15 Jahren am MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston mit der
Visualisierung von unstrukturiertem Wissen befasst und jetzt auch an der Helsinki University of Technology unterrichtet, mit
seiner Jungfirma galaxyadvisors.com in den Technopark Aarau eingezogen. Read more...
April 2008
Is collaboration the future of invention? 
Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) are online communities of like-minded people working together to create innovations.
Author and scientist Peter Gloor originated the term. He describes it as a "cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective
vision." Read more...
Spring 2008
Coolhunting through Swarm Creativity 
Was haben iPod, Facebook und YouTube gemeinsam? Sie sind innovativ, frisch und "cool". Jedes Unternehmen träumt davon solche Trends
vorherzusagen, bevor sie in der Breite wirksam werden. Genau das leistet jetzt eine MIT-Software zur Analyse sozialer Netzwerke. Ihr
Entwickler, Peter A. Gloor, zeigt, wie man damit Innovationen jagt. Read more...
February 7th, 2008
Web tool predicts election results and stock prices 
Tools such as Google Trends and Blogpulse track what people are talking or thinking about by recording the frequency
with which words are entered into search engines and appear on blog sites. Now Peter Gloor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology is going a step further, and using the web to make specific predictions. His software,
called Condor, has predicted the results of an Italian political party's internal election and successfully forecast
stock market fluctuations. Read more...
Current Projects
Swarmcreativity through COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks
The goal of this research project is to help organizations to increase knowledge worker productivity and innovation, by creating "Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs)". COINs allow for building organizations that are more creative, productive, and efficient by applying principles of creative collaboration, knowledge sharing, and social networking....read more
Combining Prediction Markets & Web Sentiment
The goal of this project is to combine prediction markets with swarm prediction through Web mining. Does the swarm (i.e. the combination of Web/ blogs/online forums) know more than the individuals participating in a prediction market?.... read more
Sensible Organizations
To goal of this project is to analyze and come up with interventions for optimizing individual and organizational creativity through microscopic social network analysis using sociometers...... read more.... MIT Media Lab Web site
In this course taught each fall jointly at MIT, Helsinki University of Technology, University of Cologne, and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), students learn to hunt for, grow and develop cool ideas by "being a bee". They learn to communicate in multinational, multicultural, multidisciplinary environments by collaborating in a virtual team with members from Finland, Germany, and the US they will never meet face-to-face. They learn how to use skype, e-mail, blogs, wikis, webconferencing most effectively. They learn about swarmcreativity, Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs), social network analysis, coolhunting and coolfarming by automatically analyzing online social networks on the Web, Blogs, Forums, e-Mail, etc. using the dynamic social network analysis tool Condor. They learn how to coolhunt in a company, on the Web, Blogs, or in online forums for cool ideas and innovators. They learn how to coolfarm cool ideas and cool people in a company, on the Web, in Blogs, or in an online forum. They will also learn about themselves by watching a “virtual mirror” of their own communication behavior, seeing how team members perceive them, as a communicator, a collaborator, or a coordinator.
Virtual Brownbag COIN on COINs"
The virtual brownbag "COIN on COINs" is the group of people from MIT, Helsinki, Cologne, Wayne State, University of Lecce and many more working on COINs, social network analysis, Condor, Coolhunting, and Coolfarming. We meeting monthly on the Web to present and discuss our latest work and technical issues and tricks with SNA and Condor.
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
5 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
phone +1 617 253 7018
pgloor@mit.edu