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Collective design and innovation are crucial in organizations. To investigate how the collective design and innovation processes would be affected by the diversity of knowledge and background of collective individual members, we conducted three collaborative design task experiments which involved nearly 300 participants who worked together anonymously in a social network structure using a custom-made computer-mediated collaboration platform. We compared the idea generation activity among three different background distribution conditions (clustered, random, and dispersed) with the help of the “doc2vec” text representation machine learning algorithm. We also developed a new method called “Idea Geography” to visualize the idea utility terrain on a 2D problem domain. The results showed that groups with random background allocation tended to produce the best design idea with the highest utility values. It was also suggested that the diversity of participants’ backgrounds distribution on the network might interact with each other to affect the diversity of ideas generated. The proposed idea geography successfully visualized that the collective design processes did find the high utility area through exploration and exploitation in collaborative work. 

Many temporal networks exhibit multiple system states, such as weekday and weekend patterns in social contact networks. The detection of such distinct states in temporal network data has recently been studied as it helps reveal underlying dynamical processes. A commonly used method is network aggregation over a time window, which aggregates a subsequence of multiple network snapshots into one static network. This method, however, necessarily discards temporal dynamics within the time window. Here we propose a new method for detecting dynamic states in temporal networks using connection series (i.e., time series of connection status) between nodes. Our method consists of the construction of connection series tensors over nonoverlapping time windows, similarity measurement between these tensors, and community detection in the similarity network of those time windows. Experiments with empirical temporal network data demonstrated that our method outperformed the conventional approach using simple network aggregation in revealing interpretable system states. In addition, our method allows users to analyze hierarchical temporal structures and to uncover dynamic states at different spatial/temporal resolutions. 

Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective decision making would be affected by the agents’ diversity in problem understanding and/or behavior in discussion, as well as by their social network structure. Simulation results indicated that groups with consistent problem understanding tended to produce higher utility values of ideas and displayed better decision convergence, but only if there was no group-level bias in collective problem understanding. Simulation results also indicated the importance of balance between selection-oriented (i.e., exploitative) and variation-oriented (i.e., explorative) behaviors in discussion to achieve quality final decisions. Expanding the group size and introducing nontrivial social network structure generally improved the quality of ideas at the cost of decision convergence. Simulations with different social network topologies revealed collective decision making on small-world networks with high local clustering tended to achieve highest decision quality more often than on random or scale-free networks. Implications of this evolutionary theory and simulation approach for future managerial research on collective, group, and multilevel decision making are discussed.