From INWA to INCA: an international collaboration in eSocial Science

The INWA Grid went ‘live’ in December 2003, connecting Curtin Business School in Western Australia through the US to EPCC in Edinburgh, making it one of the longest distance and longest running Grid-based ‘collaboratories’ in the Social Sciences. Stable network connections between Australia and China were established in January 2005, allowing the extension of INWA to the network centre of the Chinese Internet at the Computer Network and Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CNIC, CAS). The present collaboration with CNIC - Project INCA - focusses on innovation processes that can be supported by Grid technologies across a ‘virtual cluster’. This paper describes the current INWA infrastructure, which is migrating from 2nd to 3rd generation Grid technologies, and provides an increasingly homogeneous platform for collaboration across distinctively different socio-economic contexts. Here the focus of ‘innovation’ moves from enhancements in technical capability associated with enhanced computing and telecommunications, to their relationship with ‘innovation capacity’ – i.e. the ability to expand potential for innovation and extend an innovator’s reach. To explore this relationship, we outline a framework that is being used to track the capacity of this ‘virtual organisation’ as each advance in 2nd to 3rd generation technology is implemented.