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 Four Ways IT is Driving Innovation Erik Brynjolfsson, Director, MIT Center for Digital Business April, 1, 2010 [Sloan Management Review] There's always been a performance gap between companies that embrace technology and companies that resist it -- what IT innovation thinker Erik Brynjolfsson calls the productivity gap between "leaders and laggers"... Find out more...
Shattering the Myths About Enterprise 2.0 Andrew P. McAfee, Associate Director, MIT Center for Digital Business, May 2011 Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms, or ESSPs, by an organization to pursue its goals. Here's a breakdown of what the term means ... Find out more...


Big Data Conference featured in New York Times It was the bold title of a conference this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and of a widely read article in The Harvard Business Review last October: “Big Data: The Management Revolution.” Read it here: Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition.
What The GDP Misses Tim Lee is worried that the way we measure improvements in economic well-being is not suited to the Internet age Read it here: What the GDP Misses.
Erik Brynjolfsson on TEDTalk, See the Video! As machines take on more jobs, many find themselves out of work or with raises indefinitely postponed. Is this the end of growth? No, says Erik Brynjolfsson -- it’s simply the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy. A riveting case for why big innovations are ahead of us … if we think of computers as our teammates. Be sure to watch the opposing viewpoint from Robert Gordon. Watch the segment Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines.
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee on 60 Minutes Sunday, 1/13 60 Minutes host Steve Kroft sits down with MIT Sloan’s Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee to discuss robotics and other technological advances that are revolutionizing the workplace, but not necessarily creating jobs in today’s economy. Their interview is part of a larger segment titled March of the Machines, which aired on CBS this Sunday, January 13 at 8 pm. Watch the segment here.


NEW PUBLICATIONS

Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World ; Michael Cusumano "In Staying Power, Michael A. Cusumano provides the answers. A bestselling business author and leading scholar, Cusumano has spent a quarter of a century studying the world's most successful companies--many of them from the inside, by serving as an advisor to more than one hundred firms. He identifies six critical principles that have driven the success of today's foremost companies, including Google, Intel, Apple, JVC, Toyota, and Microsoft. He argues that companies today must develop distinctive organizational capabilities, not just business strategies; focus on platforms and services, not just products; pull information from the market, responding to real-time changes in demand and competitive conditions, and not just push products out; achieve economies of scope, not just scale, by creating efficiencies across all a firm's activities; and acquire flexibility, in addition to efficiency, to quickly adapt to a volatile marketplace. Drawing on real-life examples, he illustrates how the best companies put these principles into practice, identifying precisely how these ideas have lead to concrete success time after time. " —published Fall 2010
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.
The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value ; Richard Hunter . George Westerman "Through in-depth practical examples, this book, better than any other, captures not only how a CIO adds business value, but how the CIO can best communitacate what is being done. This is a very important book for both CIOs and CEOs." —F. Warren McFarlan, Harvard Business School
Andrew McAfee Associate Director / Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for Digital Business (MIT Sloan School of Management) Andrew McAfee studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself – the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry. He coined the phrase "Enterprise 2.0" in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. Find out more...