Facebook for Thermo

Facebook provides many interesting points of analysis for a company like ThermoFisher. Being a scientific company where intellectual property and also the process of innovation must be balance and leveraged in order to create and protect value, a thin line must be walked between open collaboration and also control over the limits of collaboration. Facebook's open style and ability to be data mined both directly and indirectly through intelligent spidering, provide serious threats to the intellectual property that the firm possesses (http://charlenecroft.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/facebook-privacy-and-data-mining/). Therefore having a social networking "strategy" would be important to the firm in order to ensure that the technology did not create too many unprotected information leakage points. It also provides many potential uses for collaboration including science research groups, the ability to create their own subnetworks of customers and researchers within the network, and also the ability to evaluate more macro-trends based upon user demographics in order to predict possibly where the entire research world might be moving through the use of their own intelligent agents.