Corporate Board Map – The Finnish Decision makers

Who knows who?

Inspired by the book “Linked – the new science of networks “ written by Albert-László Barabási we wanted to make a network study of our own.

A coffee table discussion with Timo Kankaanpää, software engineering lecturer lead to a project where we tried to capture how the corporation board members are connected with each other. From previous experiences we know that there are some people sitting in several corporation boards and creating connections to other high-level decision makers. Our question research question was to figure out how much connected the Finnish companies are by the board members. In addition to academic interest we had a small bet.

This discussion lead to a project, where a web robot called Retri.java was built. The robot designed by Timo crawled more than 10 000 records from the National Finnish Trade Register, which includes information about more than 500 000 companies operating in Finland and their board members. The robot used recursive searching on a free web interface to the register provided by Inoa. The results were converted in a format which could be displayed by using a network graphics software Pajek – Program for Large Network Analysis.

The results of this experiment showed that the Finnish decision makers indeed are well connected with each other. Of course many small companies with only two board members were completely isolated from other companies, but the big network – what we called as the Monster – consisted thousands of people.

This was a fun project! The complete network files are available for upon request as VRML model (this may require a plug-in for your browser) and as network file for the Pajek.

Further readings:

· Social Networks journal in volume 26 published by Elsevier Science.

· Orkut – a social experiment by Google.

· Six degrees of separation – an experimental page.

· “Friend of a friend” project page.