Q&A With MIT IDE co-director Andrew McAfee — ByDan Bigman, Chief Executive.net The last time I talked with Andrew McAfee, a cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management, it was just before Covid. McAfee, author of the bestsellers More From Less, Machine, Platform Crowd and The Second…

New research confirms the high value of distant connections on LinkedIn and other social media employment platforms — By Paula Klein Your mom was right when she told you to call that friend of her friend’s son about a new job — and now there’s data to prove it. According to a new study conducted by researchers from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and LinkedIn, published today in Science, it…

Network effects, scale, and governance drive the economic advantages of platforms — By Irving Wladawsky-Berger In July, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy held its 10th annual Platform Strategy Summit. The hybrid Summit included a number of panels and keynotes throughout the day, a few of which I attended online. [For a full recap of the day, see the newly released MIT…

The economic value of the Internet of Things is real, but it’s slow in ramping up to the next level — By Irving Wladawsky-Berger In June of 2015, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report on the Internet of Things (IoT). The report analyzed the long term economic potential of IoT by examining over 100 use cases and the IoT-based solutions in which they were generally deployed such as factories, homes…

Four ways your company can align with data-driven companies — By Beth Stackpole, MIT Sloan With the global landscape changing at a frenetic pace, an organization’s ability to be agile and make productive use of data is now central to its long-term success. Companies able to harness data’s full value will likely leapfrog those struggling with technology and organizational change…

Researchers find medical videos need better standards; machine learning tools should augment human doctors — By Paula Klein Questions about whether machine learning and AI are helping physicians and patients improve diagnosis and care — or creating more confusion — are top of mind. For instance, how effective are physicians at diagnosing heart attacks compared with algorithms? And do popular medical videos on YouTube spread…

The giant medical center is forging ahead with clinical uses in radiology, cardiology, and remote diagnostics — By Thomas H. Davenport and Randy Bean As appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review In a previous AI in Action column, we argued that in the world of health care, administrative applications of artificial intelligence were the low-hanging fruit. Sometimes, however, it is reasonable to reach for higher branches of…

If Web3 is emerging as a serious technology, how can we protect against the potential harms? — By Irving Wladawsky-Berger Transformative technologies are generally accompanied by a mixture of excitement and confusion in their early years. Something important is going on out there, although there’s no consensus on what it is yet: there’s no single dimension around which to define an emerging technology or business model.

The 10th annual MIT Platform Strategy Summit tracks a decade of data and business transformation — By Peter Krass It’s taken a decade for global enterprises to stop hoarding their data to unlock its value. Now organizations ranging from universities to Coca Cola Co., Nike to Schneider Electric are all getting on board. That was a central theme of this year’s MIT Platform Strategy Summit…