Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, postulates that there are four important environmental factors that contribute to the ultimate success or failure of a society:

1. “Continental differences in the wild plant and animal species available as starting materials for domestication.” Having more domesticatable species of flora and fauna mean a head start for that society in terms of farming, feeding a population and manual labour (from domesticated animals).

2. Rates of technological diffusion and population migration within a continent. How fast people can move around within a particular continent affects how fast they can spread technologies to other people within that continent — as well as allowing for other proximate technologies such as increased communication speed.

3. Rates of technological diffusion and population migration between continents. North Africa, being relatively easy to reach from both the Middle East and Europe, benefited from many early advantages that more southern African countries did not, due to their separation from North Africa by a large desert.

4. Differences in land area and total population size. More people or land means that a society has more of a likelihood of containing potential inventors as well as being less likely to be eliminated by competing societies.

So, you rightly ask, what does all this have to do with knowledge ecologies? Well, the same four factors influence the ability of groups of people in terms of innovation or sharing knowledge. We can sum up these factors as they influence knowledge ecologies in 4 quick points:

1. A good starting position. You need resources in order to innovate, and what your given within the organization to work with influences how innovative you’re ultimately going to be.

2. Internal technological exchange. Exchanging technology and ideas with other groups within an organization means you will be more likely to innovate.

3. External technological exchange. Exchanging technology externally is just as beneficial — and isolated organizations often falter in terms of innovation.

4. The size of the groups doing the innovating. Ostensibly, from the excerpt above, one might conclude that bigger organizations are always going to be more innovative.

The first three points are certainly important influencers in terms of innovation within an organization — yet it also becomes obvious that when a group that is too big tries to innovate, it also falters. So what’s the lesson to be learned here?

The answer seems to be that internal organizational innovation happens best in small teams that follow the first three rules. A healthy level of competition must exist between those teams in order for innovation to happen — but not so much competition that they are going to wipe each other out.