Digital Business at MIT

The MIT Sloan School of Management created the MIT Center for Digital Business as a research partnership with industry to provide leadership for faculty, students, and sponsors interested in Internet-enabled business. The results of our applied research are transforming digital business.



The Changing Software Business: From Products to Services and Other New Business Models (#236) January 2008 Over the past several years, the software business has been undergoing dramatic changes, with important implications both for users as well as producers of software products and services. Perhaps the most significant change is the decline of traditional product sales or license fees and the shift in product company revenues to services ... Find out more...
Measuring the Impact of Electronic Data Management on Information Worker Productivity January 2008 In this project, we studied the effects of digitizing work on information workers’ time-use and performance at a large insurance firm. We were able to determine of direction of causality between technology and performance by exploiting a quasi-experiment: the phased introduction of Electronic Document Management (EDM) across multiple offices at different dates. Our analysis used a “difference-in-differences” methodology to econometrically measure changes in a suite of performance metrics. This allowed us to derive unbiased estimates of the main effects ... Find out more...

John Chambers, CEO, CISCO SYSTEMS
"Our long-standing sponsorship of the MIT Center for Digital Business provides Cisco with access to some of the world's most credible research and brightest researchers. The MIT CDB has been one of our most important partners in researching issues like the value of collaboration, the role of the network as a platform, and the impact of networking technologies on productivity. Data and analysis from this MIT CDB research has provided Cisco with unique, valuable insight and thought leadership resources."

"Website Morphing"
April 9, 2010
John Hauser’s, Glen Urban’s, and Michael Braun’s article “Website Morphing”
(co-authored with Guilherme Liberali of Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil) has been selected as one of the 50 best articles published in 2009 in management and has therefore won an Emerald Management Reviews Citation of Excellence. Their article was published in Marketing Science (Vol. 28, No. 2, March-April 2009).

Emerald Management Reviews is an abstracting and indexing database that covers every article in the top 400 business and management journals worldwide. Every article that appears in these titles is sent to independent subject experts for evaluation. “Website Morphing” was selected as one of the top 50 from the 15,000 articles they reviewed throughout 2009.

Erik Brynjolfsson has been invited to join the Edgerati
April 9, 2010
Erik Brynjolfsson is being honored as one of a very select category of edgerati, a term coined to celebrate the accomplishment of individuals "who have shaped our personal understanding of the various edges that have the potential to transform the core of our societies and economies with increasing speed..."
>> Read more on Professor Brynjolfsson's selection here


NEW PUBLICATIONS	Fall 2009

Wired for Innovation ; Erik Brynjolfsson "There is little doubt that a successful future for the US economy rests on its capacity to innovate, especially in the broad and growing field of information technology, but not only there. This short, readable book surveys what is known about the complicated process of innovation, discusses how it might be encouraged, and suggests where further research might pay off with valuable insight and understanding. There are important implications here for business, government, and education." —Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1987
Enterprise 2.0 ; Andrew McAfee "Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence.
Glen Urban David Austin Professor of Marketing Chairman, MIT Center for Digital Business Glen Urban concentrates on the fascinating area of trust-based marketing on the Internet. How trust is built on a web site, how site design can maximize sales and trust, and how a trust-based marketing system could provide an alternative to the "push" type of marketing commonly observed, are just a few of the facets that Urban explores. His current research focuses on customer advocacy. His new Theory A aligns the firm as a representative of the customers needs and leads to transparency, unbiased advice, trusted advisors, and best products. Recent research concentrates on morphing a Web site to fit individual cognitive and cultural style. Find out more...
Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson Director, MIT Center for Digital Business and the Schussel Professor of Management Erik Brynjolfsson is a prize-winning researcher, educator, entrepreneur, and author. He serves as the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School and Chairman of the MIT Sloan Management Review. He lectures worldwide on business strategy and performance, pricing models and intangible assets and he teaches courses on the Economics of Information. Professor Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure the productivity contributions of information technologies. In related work, he identified the dominant role of organizational capital and other intangible assets in determining the performance of firms. Find out more...