Robert Laubacher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT

Previous efforts to support creative problem-solving have included (a) techniques such as brainstorming and design thinking to stimulate creative ideas, and (b) software tools to record and share these ideas. Now, generative AI technologies can suggest new ideas that might never have occurred to the users, and users can then select from these ideas...

In the spring of 2021, two MIT research centers and the MilliporeSigma division of Merck convened a “supermind”—a powerful combination of many minds—via an online platform to reimagine the future of the life sciences. More than 200 experts in science, healthcare, public policy, and related fields were invited to participate. Members of the supermin...

Macro-task crowdsourcing presents a promising approach to address wicked problems like climate change by leveraging the collective efforts of a diverse crowd. Such macro-task crowdsourcing requires facilitation. However, in the facilitation process, traditionally aggregating and synthesizing text contributions from the crowd is labor-intensive, dem...

Crowdsourcing holds great potential: macro-task crowdsourcing can, for example, contribute to work addressing climate change. Macro-task crowdsourcing aims to use the wisdom of a crowd to tackle non-trivial tasks such as wicked problems. However, macro-task crowdsourcing is labor-intensive and complex to facilitate, which limits its efficiency, eff...

Ill-defined and complex problems that affect multiple stakeholders with potentially conflicting perspectives are often referred to as wicked problems. The utilization of collective intelligence (CI) via web-based platforms is a promising approach for addressing such wicked problems. The management of these information systems would benefit from evi...

Humankind faces many “wicked” decision-making problems, which must be solved. One promising approach refers to crowdsourcing systems that hold the potential to solve any kind of problem – notably wicked ones. Crowdsourced solutions work well because crowds exchange knowledge from different domains – a concept known as “cross-fertilisation.” Thereby...

In 2019-2020, the Collective Intelligence Design Lab (CIDL), an initiative of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI), worked jointly with Takeda Pharmaceutical’s Center for Scientific Leadership and Innovation (CSLI) to address a challenge faced by Takeda. This paper describes the collaboration as a case study of university researchers in...

Exploring Alternative Futures to Inform Climate Action

A key issue, whenever people work together to solve a complex problem, is how to divide the problem into parts done by different people and combine the parts into a solution for the whole problem. This paper presents a novel way of doing this with groups of contests called contest webs. Based on the analogy of supply chains for physical products, t...

Global climate change is one of the most challenging problems humanity has ever faced. Fortunately, a new way of solving large, complex problems has become possible in just the last decade or so. Examples like Wikipedia and Linux illustrate how the work of thousands of people can be combined in ways that would have been impossible only a few years...

Computational simulation models help support scientifically grounded "what if" analyses by translating specialized knowledge into tools that can project the likely future impact of current actions. Models have thus become important in a variety of policy domains. In recent years, several software platforms for environmental policy-making and urban...

In this study we measure the impact of pre-existing social capital on the efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors. To construct a social network among Wikipedians we look to mutual interaction on the user talk pages of Wikipedia editors. As our data set, we analyze the communication networks associated with 3085 featured articles - the...

The emergence of the blogosphere has created new challenges for large companies in the management of their corporate reputations, since grass roots blogs can generate negative perceptions about a firm and then spread them rapidly and widely. The blogosphere has also created new opportunities for firms to enhance their reputations, because the infor...

The Climate CoLab is a system to help thousands of people around the world collectively develop plans for what humans should do about global climate change. This paper shows how the system combines three design elements (model-based planning, on-line debates, and electronic voting) in a synergistic way. The paper also reports early usage experience...

Google. Wikipedia. Threadless. All are platinum exemplars of collective intelligence in action. Two of them are famous. The third is getting there. Each of the three helps demonstrate how large, loosely organized groups of people can work together electronically in surprisingly effective ways sometimes even without knowing that they are working tog...

This report describes the structure and recent growth of the film and television industry in Massachusetts. We begin with a discussion of national trends in this industry and find that Massachusetts is one of the fastest growing locations for film and television production in the United States. We then discuss recent employment trends in this secto...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show with figures the potentialities of knowledge‐based engineering (KBE) methods in new product development (NPD). It estimates the business value generated by a tool which integrates the handoff between engineering groups of a large aerospace company. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on three...

Over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence. Examples include Google, Wikipedia, Threadless, and many others. To take advantage of the possibilities these new systems represent, it is necessary to go beyond just seeing them as a fuzzy collection of “cool” ideas. What is...

This document discusses a few versatile, tool-like crowd performance algorithms necessary for humans to employ internet technologies to make better decisions collectively. This document also readily acknowledges that true collective intelligence approaches are foremost about organizational culture change and encouraging shared group norms (i.e., va...

We introduce the concept of sensor-based applications for the daily business settings of organizations and their individual workers. Wearable sensor devices were developed and deployed in a real organization, a bank, for a month in order to study the effectiveness and potential of using sensors at the organizational level. It was found that pattern...

This paper describes first results of an ongoing research effort using real time data collected by social badges to correlate temporal changes in social interaction patterns with performance of individual actors and groups. Towards that goal we analyzed social interaction among a team of employees at a bank in Germany, and developed a set of interv...

This paper describes a visual social browser for exploring the evolution of social networks over time. We consider the exchange of e-mails between actors as an approximation of social ties. Our system analyzes the dynamic progression of communication patterns of e-mail traffic within groups of individuals. It combines a discrete visualization view,...

Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) are groups of self-motivated individuals from various parts of an organization or from multiple organizations, empowered by the Internet, who work together on a new idea, driven by a common vision. In this paper we report first results of a project that examines innovation networks by analyzing the e-mail a...

By combining virtual communities with Internet portal and content management technologies, Collaborative Knowledge Networks (CKNs) (Gloor, 2002) share, access and extend the tacit and explicit knowledge within and across organizations. CKNs are a special kind of web-enabled communities of practice, where like-minded people collaborate and work toge...

Will the large industrial corporation dominate the twenty-first century as it did the twentieth? Maybe not. Drawing on their research at MIT's Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher postulate a world in which business is not controlled through a stable chain of management in a large, perman...

January 1997 A 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." One of the key activities for this initiative has been developing a series of coherent scenarios of possible future organizations. The scenarios are not intended as predic...

What if, rather than relying on an employer or the government to meet their human needs, individual workers joined independent organizations whose primary purpose was to provide stable "homes" as they moved from job to job? We call these organizations "guilds" by analogy to the craft associations of the Middle Ages, and in this paper we examine wha...

This paper aims to demonstrate that ties obtained by mining e-mails archives do not necessarily provide a complete and realistic approximation of interactions by other communication media. The results of our project indicate that factors such as co-location and the nature of working relationships influence the preference for face-to-face interactio...

Recently, researchers have started analyzing e-mail archives of individuals and groups as an approximation of social ties. However it can be hard to obtain complete e-mail archives covering all exchanges between a group of individuals. Frequently, only e-mailboxes of a subset of the analyzed actors are available for analysis. In this project we rep...

Providing Web-based tools to support collaboration between small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) meets an important business need. The paper describes an approach for developing such tools. A central element is the process library, a repository of generic process templates and specializations of those templat es. By modifying the templates, SME...