MIT Sloan Management Review

What’s “crowd funding”? It involves consumers investing small amounts of money (as little as $1) in the businesses of musicians or fashion designers whose products they fancy.

No sooner have businesses started to really grasp the potential benefits of Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking sites...then someone identifies a new, potentially negative application for them.

A “postcompany” school of experts says information technology is enabling a new world of seamless collaboration among businesses. They recommend that executives tear down the “walls” and merge their companies into amorphous “enterprise networks.” Nick Carr counters that new technologies will never conquer cutthroat competition and shows why managers need to be wary of alliances that foreclose opportunities for advantage.

Increasingly, information technology isn’t just for supporting the strategy, it is the strategy. Unfortunately, many CEOs send their managers negative signals about IT’s role. Only the “believer CEO,” who demonstrates through daily actions a belief in the strategic value of IT, can help others manage effectively in the Information Age. The authors offer examples of such CEOs and give some techniques for addressing blind spots to improve an organization’s competitiveness.

Revolutions, whether the overthrow of governments or breakthroughs in technology, are usually visible. The knowledge revolution, though propelled by the twin engines of computer technology and communication technology, is a revolution of minds and ideas rather than of mass and energy.

The Internet promises to revolutionize the dynamics of international commerce and, like the telephone and fax machine, may be a major force in the democratization of capitalism.