Do companies benefit from social networking?

SmartMobs points to this ZDNet column which in turn points to research at UW and NYU about social networks -- not sites like Facebook, but actual connections with people across media:

According to two U.S. researchers, fewer degrees of separation make companies more innovative. They’ve studied the innovative performance of about a thousand companies in various industries over a six-year period. And they’ve concluded that “companies that network and form strategic alliances are more creative and develop more patented inventions than those that don’t.”

As ZDNet author Roland Piquepaille cautions, the result seems intuitive to many of us, but the methodology -- measuring innovation via patent numbers -- may not be the best for studying innovation per se. Still, worth a look.

» Do companies benefit from social networking? | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com

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