Wired for innovation - Erik Brynjolfsson

Two experts on the information economy explore the true economic value of technology and innovation.

A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education.

Innovation continues through booms and busts. This book provides an essential guide for policy makers and economists who need to understand how information technology is transforming the economy and how it will create value in the coming decade.

Erik Brynjolfsson, Schussel Family Professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, is the coeditor of Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research (MIT Press).

Compact and insightful, Wired for Innovation provides a synthesis of the research on econometric analyses of information and communication technologies (ICT) that bear on organizational and industrial productivity.

If e-business had an oracle, Erik Brynjolfsson would be anointed.