The most powerful scientific advances are propelled by creative ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries. Few fields exemplify this as thoroughly as nanoscience, which promises to benefit humankind by delivering radically new technologies-if scientists from different disciplines can work together creatively. Unfortunately, initiating interdisciplinary conversations can be a costly undertaking in the context of academia, where disciplines are separated by entrenched physical and social structures. We present a new method, called 'speedstorming,' designed to improve the process of teaching and initiating creative collaboration. Early results show great promise for accelerating the rate of collaboration formation in the field of nanoscience. We found that for teaching and forming creative collaboration, speedstorming is more efficient and more effective than group brainstorming. This article explores the rationale for using such a method in nanoscience research and education and details the steps to conducting speedstorming sessions to achieve several common aims in a variety of settings. Limitations and unanswered questions regarding the method are also explored.

Creative collaborations that cross disciplinary boundaries are essential to innovation. Individuals face challenges, however, in forming new collaborations. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that the common formats of brainstorming and free-form networking are insufficient for enabling such collaborations to form. We present a potential solution called speedstorming, a pair-wise method of creative interaction similar to the round-robin 'speeddating' technique. Speedstorming combines an explicit purpose, time limits, and one-on-one encounters to create a setting where boundary-spanning opportunities can be recognized, ideas can be explored at a deep level of interdisciplinary expertise, and potential collaborators can be quickly assessed. A comparison of speedstorming and brainstorming suggests that ideas from speedstorming were more technically specialized and that speedstorming participants were more certain in their assessments of the collaborative potential of others. This paper concludes with a discussion of the method's application in a variety of settings.

I believe that individuals who have had the opportunity to serve as policy entrepreneurs acquire tacit knowledge about how to get things done. This knowledge is difficult to share because it is more like learning to ride a bicycle than memorizing the quadratic formula. Furthermore, the knowledge, skills, and heuristics policy entrepreneurs acquire is often dependent on the particular context they are

People with shared interests are using the Internet to solve problems, accomplish tasks, and create resources that would be well beyond the reach of any one person or organization. The Internet is being used to create virtual libraries, factor large numbers, organze massive volunteer efforts, and filter information in a collaborative fashion. The ability to levera the efforts of large numbers of networked users has important economic, social, and political consequences. This phenomenon is important to policy makers because it can potentially be used to leverage scarce taxpayer dollars and promote applications of the information infrastructure. "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth"-Archimedes and leveraging the "small efforts of the many" as opposed to the "big efforts of the few."[2] Think of the Internet as a distributed, massively parallel supercomputer that is connecting not only microprocessors but people, information repositories, sensors, intelligent agents, and mobile code. There are many examples of Internet users leveraging cyberspace, some of which will be described in greater detail below. Six hundred volunteers from five continents used 1600 computers to factor RSA-129 in eight months, a mathematical feat that was projected to take 40 quadrillion years. Users of MUDs collaborate to build elaborate text-based virtual reality environments. Archives of scientific e-prints and popular indexes of the World Wide Web such as Yahoo are maintained primarily through the submissions of thousands of individuals and organizations. Using a bulletin board on Niftyserve (a commercial on-line service), Japanese users of the HP-100 collaborated to create a public domain library of Japanese fonts. The World Wide Web was used to organize NetDay, a grassroots effort by more than 20,000 volunteers to deploy internal local area networks in thousands of California schools. The collective wisdom of many participants in a given newsgroup often distilled into answers to "frequently asked questions," or FAQs. Leaders in both government and business recognize the importance of this phenomena. Vice President Gore recently gave a speech in which he argued that "distributed

The premise of this essay is that the explosive growth of mobile communications can be a powerful tool for addressing some of the most critical challenges of the 21st century, such as promoting vibrant democracies, fostering inclusive economic growth, and reducing the huge inequities in life expectancy between rich and poor nations. The benefits of mobile communications are particularly profound for developing countries, many of which are "leapfrogging" the traditional fixed telecommunications infrastructure. As a result, billions of people in developing countries are gaining access to modern communications of any sort for the first time. There is no doubt that mobile communications are having a significant impact on the way Americans live, work, and communicate with each other. But the impact is no doubt more keenly felt by the African mother who can call ahead to determine whether a doctor is available to treat her sick child before traveling for hours to seek treatment.Obviously, mobile communications are not a panacea for the daunting challenges faced by the 2.7 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day. Like any new technology, it has costs and risks as well as benefits, and some of the promised benefits will undoubtedly fail to materialize. It's worth remembering that 19th century pundits thought the telegraph would inevitably lead to world peace, or that in 1922 Thomas Edison predicted the motion picture would "revolutionize our educational system … and supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks." 1 But Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs may well be right when he concludes that "the cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development." 2 With a few exceptions, the U.S. government has been largely oblivious to the ways in which the rapid diffusion of mobile services (and other new technologies)