A great project......

Dear Community:

Welcome to We Are Smarter Than Me, an ambitious community addressing a crucial shift in how businesses operate as they learn to leverage the power of "community."
The central premise of We Are Smarter Than Me is that large groups of people ("We") can, and should, take responsibility for traditional business functions that are currently performed by companies, industries and experts ("Me").
What do we mean? Let's look at some recent examples:
Procter & Gamble is recruiting 600,000 housewives to help market its products through word of mouth. In return for much greater reach and impact, the company is giving up control of the marketing message, relying on its community of customers/marketers to craft their own message in the most appropriate fashion.
Microlending websites provide the ability for individuals to lend to small businesses directly. The underwriting decisions (assessing the risk of each loan) are made by individuals, and the price of loan is established through lender bidding. We expect these lending decisions to be superior to the same decisions currently made by experts at banks.
Patients faced with rare diseases are increasingly turning to internet discussion groups to learn more about risks and treatment options, and as a result are participating with doctors more actively (in some cases much more actively) in decisions regarding their care.
A few books have recently been written on this topic, but they all fail to confront one central paradox. While they extol the power of communities, they were each written by only one person.
We're putting this paradox to the test by inviting hundreds of thousands of authors to contribute to this "network book" using today's technologies.
The book will be published by Pearson, and each contributor will be listed as an author of the book. All authors will receive an equal vote on the distribution of book royalties to charity.
We're seeking from our authors real examples of companies who are trying — successfully, or unsuccessfully — to harness the power of "community." And we're looking to develop and share insights about why these approaches work or don't work; and what companies have to do to make them work better.
Finally, we have invited you — members of the Wharton and Sloan School communities — to become authors in your own right. You are the students, faculty and alumni of two illustrious institutions, leaders in management and technology. We look forward to your participation and to the insights you can contribute to the project.
Sincerely,

Timothy MooreEditor in Chief, Pearson Education
Jon SpectorVice Dean, The Wharton SchoolDirector, Aresty Institute of Executive Education
Barry LibertChief Executive OfficerShared Insights US, LLC
Thomas Malone,Patrick J. McGovern Professor of ManagementMIT Sloan School of Management

Entrepreneurship ( Part 1)

The understanding of entrepreneurship owes a lot to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian School of economics. In Schumpeter (1950), an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship forces "creative destruction" across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products and business models. In this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. Despite Schumpeter's early 20th-century contributions, the traditional microeconomic theory of economics has had little room for entrepreneurs in their theoretical frameworks (instead assuming that resources would find each other through a price system). (source Wikipedia with ref. The Economist Magazine, March 11, 2006, pp 67).