How to grow a COIN in a Medical Community

Peter A. Gloor, Francesca Grippa, Peter Margolis, Michael Seid, Richard Coletti,
Amy Borgert, George Dellal

In this paper we describe a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of a team of

medical researchers who are trying to establish a COIN consisting of patients of
a chronic disease, family members of patients, doctors, and researchers. The
data analysis is based on an e-mail archive consisting of the full mailboxes of the
five project leaders covering the whole period of COIN formation. We conducted
a dynamic analysis of the e-mail network looking at social network analysis
metrics such as betweenness centrality and density over time, as well as
contribution index and core/periphery structure. We also did a semantic analysis
of the e-mail subject headings. External perception of team effectiveness was
done through a Web buzz analysis.

Preliminary results indicate that after the first physical meeting of the full team the
betweenness centrality of the official leaders went down noticeably, as tasks
were delegated to other team members, whose centrality decreased as the
leaders’ centrality fell.

The patients, who are the main constituency of this project and could contribute
invaluable advise, are still surprisingly peripheral in the entire project team and
have a low contribution index. We also found that a similar peripheral position
was held by some very senior team members who seem focused almost
exclusively on external projects, and are (not yet) well connected to the core of
the project team. The team seems to be too inwardly focused, engaged in
internal coordination activities and scarcely involved in managing across
boundaries. To increase the success of COIN formation, the team might need to
extend their ties to the peripheral patients and senior members, whose
specialized expertise is essential to disseminate knowledge outside of the team
boundaries.

Another finding shows that removal of central leaders leads to a partial

dissolution of the team structure, with high fragmentation characterized by 91%
of nodes disconnected and a drastic increase in network centralization (97%
increase of group betweenness centrality).

1
Resilience of the network could be increased by delegating more tasks to
informal leaders who have been identified by removing the four formal leaders.

College, University, Industry Represented: Massachusetts Institute of

Technology Center for Collective Intelligence; Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
Medical Center; University of Vermont College of Medicine

Download copies of COINs 2009 research and industry papers at ScienceDirect.

Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/issue/59087-2010-999979995-
2182758

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 2, Issue 4, The 1st

Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference - COINs2009. Edited by Kenneth
Riopelle, Peter Gloor, Christine Miller and Julia Gluesing.

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