And Now for Something Completely Virtually Different
This week I will be attending the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, reporting on the event and exhibits. Readers of my blog will know that I’ve been keenly interested the collaborative enterprise, which indeed, is the title of an important new book by Charles Heckscher of the Rutgers University, Center for Workplace Transformation (The Collaborative Enterprise: Managing Speed and Complexity in Knowledge-Based Businesses, Yale UP). The collaborative enterprise, according to Heckscher, is an emerging organizational form, in an evolutionary line from the days of the guild and crafts association, through simple bureaucracy of the 19th century to 20th century paternalistic decentralized bureaucracy to the era of the emerging collaborative enterprise.
While my attention will be focused at conference on the Virtual
Worlds for the Enterprise track, there's sessions on technology, business and strategy, community, and of course, entertainment and marketing.
As
Susan Wu has noted in a Worlds in Motion interview, “all social interaction
online will be driven by game mechanics.” Until recently the worlds of gaming and online collaboration have been moving
relatively separate spheres. Susan’s work
at Charles Rivers Ventures focuses on
finding the companies who are at the nexus of social networking and gaming.
Virtual World conference sessions focusing on the enterprise will explore the kinds of applications that work best for the enterprise, and platforms that are appropriate for enterprise use, evaluated along the BEST guidelines (Business, Economic Value, Social Interaction and Technology).
See you there.
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