Intelligent Metabusiness

Abstract

In 1994, the Sloan School of Management at MIT inaugurated a multi-year research and education initiative called “Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century”, headed by Thomas Malone, Director, Center for Coordination Science. One of the key activities of this initiative has been developing a series of coherent scenarios of possible future organizations. The Scenario Working Group considered a wide variety of possible driving forces, major uncertainties, and logics that might shape 21st century organizations. Two scenarios were then created addressing the size and the modus-operandi of the future organizations: “Small Companies, Large Networks”, as the one found in Northern Italy (Textile Production in the Prato region of Italy), and “Virtual Countries”, as more mergers and acquisitions are turning up worldwide (e.g., Exxon and Mobil) (Laubacher & Malone, 1997).