Everybody knows about the importance of place: Silicon Valley is the primary example of a high tech cluster, with the UK equivalent being Silicon Fen (around Cambridge). Places can have a buzz about them for one reason or another, as a hot bed of creativity or innovation. Economists talk about economies of scale through shared suppliers, customers, staff, institutions etc. The theory being that the tacit knowledge between all the various ‘actors’ is very sticky and difficult to transport. However, I’ve witnessed too many attempts to replicate Silicon Valley to far less glamorous locations; needless to say the results are often very poor, precisely because it is very hard to move this ‘sticky knowledge’ and replicate or manufacture the buzz of activity. Is this effort on boosting physical locations misplaced – should we be looking online for the Silicon Valleys of the future? An interesting aspect of the online world is that it is the context that brings people together online before the personality. This has potentially interesting spin offs as we find ourselves interacting with people we might otherwise ignore for whatever reason, therefore increasing our likelihood of exposure to new and better ideas (see Ron Burt for more on this). If our online communities are to collaborate together in a meaningful way then they need to build trust between participants. So I have 2 questions I’m keen to explore at Uploading Innovation:

1. How do you build trust online in a meaningful way and how does it differ to offline relationships?
2. What impact are online communities having on communities centred on locations and places?

So in summary, can we extrapolate any learnings as to how different communities build trust and collaborate, either physical or virtually, and how is the changing?