Productive Social Networks

Marshall Van Alstyne and co-authors Sinan Aral and Erik Brynjolfsson recently completed a five-year analysis of how IT makes people more productive. Their study was sponsored by The National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel Corp. and analyzed 1,300 projects and 125,000 e-mails to see how IT influences individual productivity. They were particularly keen to understand the factors predicting revenue generation and project completion. The study found that IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but that it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking. They also concluded that IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience did. This is encouraging news to those of us who seek to develop infrastructures that support collaboration and personal productivity. Click here and here for abstracts of the study.

Van Alstyne's overall research program at MIT includes studying the economics of free software and platform innovation in which he explores socially optimal licensing of information goods in order to promote 1) adoption of and 2) complementary investment in an information platform by 3rd parties. His work has received an NSF Career Award, two best paper awards, and has appeared in Science, Management Science, and the Harvard Business Review.