Keystone sector methodology applied to Portugal
Efficiency is achieved when each player “maximizes the number of non-
redundant contacts in the network in order to maximize the yield in structural holes per
contact”. As there is little gain from a new redundant contact, we say that, given Ni
networks with the same sizes NxN, Nk will be the more efficient network if it has the
high level of non-redundant contacts because the marginal cost to obtain the same
amount of a benefit is higher.
Effectiveness is a different design principle that requires a distinction between
primary and secondary contacts, in order to focus resources on preserving the primary
contacts. In this design, contacts are not persons but ports of access to clusters of
people beyond. These ports should be non-redundant to allow separate and more
diversified sources of benefits. While the efficiency principle concerns the average
number of people reached with a primary contact, the second principle, concerns the
total amount of people reached through all the primary contacts.
The minimum efficiency line in fig. 1 describes the case in which each new
contact is completely redundant to the network; the maximum efficiency line describes
the case where each new contact is non-redundant. The other two lines in the middle
describe the more probable patterns of network growth. The decreasing efficiency line
refers to the case where initial contacts add a lot more than later contacts, once they
start becoming redundant when friends of friends are included. The increasing
efficiency line, where the contacts start to be redundant, and progressively shift to a
cluster pattern when each player expands through the inclusion of contacts existent in
other clusters. The more efficient players are those who can access to the structure
holes (right side of the X - axis).
The two growth patterns can be desirable, depending on the strategy of the
player and the strength of the primary contacts. If density can lower the probability that
the contact will know about an opportunity, then it is worthy to increase the number of
contacts in the cluster so that resultant redundancy offsets the imperfect information
transmission within it.
The structural holes argument captures the causal agent directly and provides a
different focus than other approaches (i.e. weak ties in Granovetter) mainly because it
considers the player empowerment through the control benefits that the holes provide
beyond the information benefits. Thus, players with an optimized network for structural