A Discovery Network (DN) is a community that can include commercial, academic, governmental and independent entities collaborating and coordinating their efforts to enrich society with new material goods and services, and extracting some value from doing so. The DN can also be viewed as a fully integrated structure, taking in, producing, and processing data, information, and knowledge, to produce goods and services for the global market. This community is organized around the DN core, which provides structure, support, leadership, and acts as the keeper of its culture. The ultimate goal of the DN core is to create and maintain a generative environment where synergistic relations between its members are nourished, leading to new ideas and their applications.
The term "Discovery Network" was coined by Tiberius Brastaviceanu in 2008, in his work on collaborative networks published for the Multitude Project. The first Discovery Network project was created in June 2010 around the Matchmaking Device System, a consumer electronics product invented by Tiberius Brastaviceanu in October 2006.