For over 20 years, Almende has been involved in more than 70 research and development projects that aim to make the world smarter through self-organization. Self-organization is a principle originating in nature where a group of individuals is able to collaborate and advance without central leadership. We stimulate self-organization by increasing the speed, frequency, and quality of interaction between people and their environment, enabling the emergence of new organizational structures and higher levels of organization. Technology is an important facilitator for this goal, which is why our team consists of software engineers, machine learning experts, and data scientists.

Applying the principle above to social groups has allowed us to stimulate self-organizing teams which do not require planning but instead respond to events as they occur, and to empower decision-makers in healthcare or logistics to make better decisions in less time. Because people are able to interact with others easily and transparently, it becomes much easier to deal with problems as they occur with little to no management.

We also apply self-organization to technology we develop. By doing so, we create technical components which can learn from one another and collectively decide on the best course of action. This can be used to, e.g., create smarter IoT devices, or realize swarms of drones, or distribute algorithms more intelligently.