a good or service to have a value to a potential customer which depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service. In other words, the number of prior adopters is a term in the value available to the next adopter. (Wikipedia)In our current pilot in Singapore that aims at mapping research resources with direct input from researchers, the networking effect is one of the positive values that can count towards adoption. For example, an example of research resource could be a researcher's list of scientific publications. If this researcher were then asked to enter these publications into a public database that can be searched by a large number of other researchers, the fact that these searches could result in potential collaborations would be a value add. The networking effect grows fast in the scenario where the database grows to the extent that researchers that do not have their publications in there fall out of the radar screen and thus have their chances of collaboration significantly diminished. In this scenario a researcher would feel compelled to not only initially enter this information, but also to keep it up to date.
The sharing of curriculum vitae at a national level is actually the case in the Lattes Platform, initially launched in Brazil and now spread to other countries in South America and Asia. In the Lattes Platform case, however, the Brazilian government also added a mandate in that having the information in this format is required for obtaining research funding and academic promotion.
This balance between positive incentives (e.g., value-add through the networking effect) and negative incentives (e.g., government and institutional mandate) is interesting, but to date there are no models guiding us in relation to the appropriate balance between the two across different environments. An interesting topic of future investigation.
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