In this paper, we present a model of ‘collective innovation’ building upon the network formation formalism introduced by Jackson and Wolinski (1996) and Jackson and Watts (2002). Agents localized on a circle benefit from knowledge flows from some others with whom they are directly or indirectly connected. They also face costs for direct connections which are linearly increasing with geographical distance separating them. The dynamic process of network formation departs from available literature in that it exhibits preferential meetings for agents close to each other. As our main result, we provide a characterisation of the set of stochastically stable networks selected in the long run. Their architectures are compared to the ones obtained in the simple ‘connections model'. Our main result is to show under what circumstances pairwise stable “small worlds” networks are stochastically selected.