Stop chatting and start innovating (Image: Solent News/Rex Features)

IT’S a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it: for innovation to thrive on the internet, we must break up the very social networks that the web has made possible.

Previous research has shown that certain patterns of social interaction make radical innovation more likely. Bold ideas are typically incompletely formed when first conceived and easily shot down by criticism. Hence, they emerge more readily in communities in which individuals work mostly in small and relatively isolated groups, giving their ideas time and space to mature.

The problem, says social …