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Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is Reshaping the EconomyOctober 2009
Publisher:
  • The MIT Press
ISBN:978-0-262-01366-6
Published:30 October 2009
Pages:
128
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Bibliometrics
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Abstract

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. Brynjolfsson and Saunders go on to examine the real sources of value in the emerging information economy, including intangible inputs and outputs that have defied traditional metrics. For instance, intangible organizational capital is not directly observable on a balance sheet yet amounts to trillions of dollars of value. Similarly, such nonmarket transactions of information goods as Google searches or views of Wikipedia articles are an increasingly large share of the economy yet virtually invisible in the GDP statistics. Drawing on work done at the MIT Center for Digital Business and elsewhere, Brynjolfsson and Saunders explain how to better measure the value of technology in the economy. They treat technology as not just another type of ordinary capital investment by also focusing on complementary investmentsincluding process redesign, training, and strategic changesand ton he value of product quality, timeliness, variety, convenience, and new products. 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.

Cited By

  1. Bauer J and Knieps G (2018). Complementary innovation and network neutrality, Telecommunications Policy, 42:2, (172-183), Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018.
  2. Lee K, Buss G and Veit D (2016). A heuristic approach for the allocation of resources in large-scale computing infrastructures, Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience, 28:5, (1527-1547), Online publication date: 10-Apr-2016.
  3. ACM
    Zelenkov Y Impact of Knowledge Management and Change Management on the Effectiveness of the Firm Proceedings of the The 11th International Knowledge Management in Organizations Conference on The changing face of Knowledge Management Impacting Society, (1-7)
  4. ACM
    Yanagihara S and Koga H (2016). The significance of ICT in the generation of code of conduct, ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, 45:3, (33-37), Online publication date: 5-Jan-2016.
  5. Seethamraju R (2015). Adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), Information Systems Frontiers, 17:3, (475-492), Online publication date: 1-Jun-2015.
  6. ACM
    Luna D, Duarte-Valle A, Picazo-Vela S and Luna-Reyes L Assessing the impacts of digital government in the creation of public value Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, (61-68)
  7. ACM
    Hedman J and Henningsson S Competition and collaboration shaping the digital payment infrastructure Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Electronic Commerce, (178-185)
  8. Dos Santos B, Zheng Z, Mookerjee V and Chen H (2012). Are New IT-Enabled Investment Opportunities Diminishing for Firms?, Information Systems Research, 23:2, (287-305), Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012.
  9. ACM
    Brynjolfsson E, Hofmann P and Jordan J (2010). Cloud computing and electricity, Communications of the ACM, 53:5, (32-34), Online publication date: 1-May-2010.
Contributors
  • Stanford University
  • UBC Sauder School of Business

Index Terms

  1. Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy

      Recommendations

      Reviews

      David Bellin

      Aptly titled, this quick read is written in the spirit of Wired magazine. It consists of eight brief chapters: "Technology, Innovation, and Productivity in the Information Age," "Measuring the Information Economy," "IT's Contributions to Productivity and Economic Growth," "Business Practices That Enhance Productivity," "Organizational Capital," "Incentives for Innovation in the Information Economy," "Consumer Surplus," and "Frontier Research Opportunities." Since each chapter could easily be the size of this short book alone, the authors add very little depth to any one topic. It is unclear what the authors view as information technology (IT), and it seems that they include any technology that they care to choose, including components that do not fall under technology at all. As for measuring the information economy, they fail to reference the pioneering works by Porat [1] and Machlup [2]. The chapter footnotes tend toward textual amplifications, and should have been either included in the main body of material or deleted. The end-of-chapter bibliographies of two or three titles are heavily weighted toward other secondary sources, and are of little use to those seeking to explore the issues in more depth. However, the full bibliography at the end of the book is quite decent. In summary, this book will be of no interest to researchers, and of no use to practitioners. Online Computing Reviews Service

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