Two decades of teaching Collaborative Innovation Networks — small, self-organizing teams that build the new. Each year a cohort measures how real collaboration works, using AI to read the honest signals of people, groups, and, lately, plants.
The current cohort, running this year across the partner universities — pre-work, block course, and student projects.
Build the tools yourself: read a face, a voice, a group chat, and a plant's bioelectric trace. From Paracelsus to transformers, the same machine before a new world each time.
Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) are teams of self-motivated people who share a vision and collaborate to realize it. The idea was first described in Swarm Creativity (2006), which gave this site its name.
The COIN Seminar has been taught for over twenty years across HSLU Lucerne, the University of Cologne, and the University of Bamberg. Students learn to see collaboration as something measurable — reading the honest signals hidden in communication, faces, voices, and, in recent years, the bioelectric signals of plants — and build the tools to do it themselves.
Led by Peter A. Gloor (MIT Research Affiliate; Honorary Professor, University of Cologne), with co-instructors Janine Hacker (Bamberg) and Simon Wolf (Cologne).