Collaborative Innovation Networks (COIN) are cyberteams of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by the Web to collaborate in achieving a common goal by sharing ideas, information and work. In a COIN, knowledge workers collaborate and share in internal transparency. They communicate directly rather than through hierarchies. And they innovate and work towards common goals in self-organization instead of being ordered to do so. Working this way is key to successful innovation, and it is no exaggeration to state that COINs are the most productive engines of innovation ever. COINs produced some of the most revolutionary drivers of change of the Internet age such as the Web and Linux.

Collaborative Interest Networks (CINs) comprise people who share the same interests but do little actual work together in a virtual team. The overwhelming majority of a CIN's population is made up of silent readers or information seekers - called "lurkers" in Internet language; the minority is a small group of active experts who share what they know with the lurkers, who silently visit a Web site without contributing any content.

Collaborative Learning Networks (CLNs) comprise people who come together in a community and share not only a common interest but also common knowledge and a common practice. People in these networks typically join the community to get to know and learn from like-minded people.

Together, the ecosystem they create is a Collaborative Knowledge Network (CKN) - a high-speed feedback loop in which the innovative results of COINs are immediately taken up and tested, refined or rejected by learning and interest networks, and fed back to the originating COINs. The CKN ecosystem is the main mechanism by which to carry COIN innovations over the tipping point.