Zann Gill (M.Arch. Harvard) worked as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation. Her entry to the international competition Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century, sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and Mainichi Newspapers, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government, tied with Matsushita Corp. for first place and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki. She proposed a networked system of sixteen initiatives — a framework comprised of diverse interlinked components for urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. More recently at NASA she developed program plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and the astrobiology program for NASA University. She founded DESYN lab to apply her method to "raise collaborative IQ." See also the summary at ECO•DESYN.

After refining her method for fostering innovation networks in Australia, where there was an Australia-Japan initiative to design a "city of the future," Zann Gill wanted to implement Innovation Networks on a smaller scale. So she moved back to the United States, aiming to prove her method at NASA, where collaboration across disciplines for designing missions into space demands constant innovation. Her first Innovation Network proposal at NASA, netCITE (networked Collaboratory for Innovative Technology Experiments in 1998), was designed to network the then proposed Intelligent Systems program at NASA Ames and Intelligent Synthesis Environment at NASA Langley using the Information Power Grid developed by Argonne National Laboratory, the Department of Energy and NASA. Subsequently she conceived and developed the plan for BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts), a collaboratory to bring together bio-info-nano and earth science researchers to develop cross-disciplinary programs and projects, and NASA University, with its first pilot program in astrobiology.

The eight-step feedback cycle shown in the diagram starts with data gathering and progresses toward knowledge mapping and integration to support complex decision-making challenges.

The principles of Innovation Networks apply at a range of scales where data needs to be integrated, modeled, and shared across disciplines.