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."
Michael Cusumano has been named one of the top 50 2009 Agenda Setters in Information Technology by silicon.com October 20, 2009 > Michael Cusumano - Agenda Setters 2009. Michael Cusumano has been named one of the top 50 2009 Agenda Setters in Information Technology by silicon.com “for altering the way the business cycle of tech firms is viewed.” The silicon.com Agenda Setters list is voted for by an expert panel which chooses the 50 people considered to exert the most influence on the worldwide IT industry.
Thomas Malone , The New Europe (Portugal) October 18, 2009 > THE CHALLENGE OF THE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE At a recent conference held in Lisbon, MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Malone presented his vision of that the role of collective intelligence in the organizations of the future will be a new collaborative platform between the different actors, with the strategic challenge of reinforcing the central competences of society.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Schrage take cover of the Wall Street Journal’s, "The Journal Report - Business Insight" August 17, 2009 > THE NEW, FASTER FACE OF INNOVATION Thanks to technology, change has never been so easy-or so cheap. That makes innovation, the lifeblood of growth, more efficient and cheaper. This new era of experimentation gives new offerings and marketing efforts a better shot at success than ever before. It also changes dramatically what companies can and should do.


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.
Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson Director, MIT Center for Digital Business and the Schussel Professor of Management Find out more...