The research conducted by business school professors helps identify or create corporate best practices and helps business leaders stay on top of rapidly changing environments. Today we are highlighting one example of the innovative research conducted by b-schools – a proejct unprecedented – even among the top business schools – for its size and scope.
Wharton and MIT Sloan announced last week that they will be the lead collaboraters on a groundbreaking new book on the contributions of Web 2.0 technologies to business practices. The book, tentatively title “We Are Smarter Than Me,” is due to be published in Fall 2007 and will be one of the the first major book projects to be collectively written and edited. Business school students, professors and alumni, as well as working professionals and others are invited to contribute material to the book.
The book will focus on technologies such as blogs, online social networks, and wikis that allow for large-scale collaboration. Contributers are asked to provide real examples of companies tapping in to online communities, after which collaborators will analyze the success or failure of these various approaches and seek to identify best practices for making use of collaborative techonology to grow and enhance businesses. The book will also examine how new collaborative technologies are changing the way once separate companies, industries or experts do business. Based on the idea presented in James Surowiecki’s 2005 book The Wisdom of the Crowd, that large groups of people can sometimes be better at innovating, solving problems, or even predicting the future, the “We Are Smarter” project is an experiment in decentralized decision making, community building, and creation of knowledge through collective wisdom – as well as a foray into a new kind of writing and publishing process.
Like Wikipedia, registered collaborators will have the ability to add, edit, and delete content from the online draft of the book. Wharton and MIT Sloan report that more than 1,000 collaborators have already registered on the book’s site, getting the project off to an early start. An initial draft of the book is scheduled to be presented in March 2007 at the Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas. For more information on the “We Are Smarter Than Me” project or to register as a collaborator, visited www.wearesmarter.org. To learn more about the MIT Sloan and Wharton research centers sponsoring the project, visit the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management.
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