Acknowledgments

This chapter is an abridged version of MIT 21st Century Initiative Working Paper #001, January 1997. The full text of the working paper is available at http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html.

The lead authors are grateful to members of the Scenarios Working Group for their contributions to the project. The members, and their MIT affiliations, were:

Scenario Creation Group

• Erik Brynjolfsson (Information Technology)

• John Carroll (Organizational Studies)

• Donald Lessard (Strategy)

• Stuart Madnick (Information Technology)

• Thomas Malone (Information Technology)

• Wanda Orlikowski (Information Technology)

• Sandy Pentland (Media Laboratory)

• Paul Resnick (Information Technology)

• Jack Rockart (Information Technology)

• Michael Scott Morton (Strategy)

• Maureen Scully (Industrial Relations)

• David Tennenhouse (Laboratory for Computer Science)

Scenario Review Group

• Deborah Ancona (Organizational Studies)

• Lotte Bailyn (Organizational Studies)

• Charles Fine (Operations Management)

• Mauro Guill n (Organizational Studies)

• Rebecca Henderson (Strategy)

• Richard Locke (Industrial Relations)

• Thomas Magnanti (Operations Research)

• Daniel Nyhart (Law)

• William Ocasio (Organizational Studies)

• JoAnne Yates (Communications)

We also thank Peter Schwartz, CEO of Global Business Network, for his contributions as facilitator of the Working Group.

Special thanks go to Robert Russman Halperin, who as Executive Director of the 21st Century Initiative, helped launch the scenario project and see it through its first two years.

The scenarios project was made possible by the financial support of the following 21st Century Initiative's sponsors:

Founding Sponsors

• British Telecom

• EDS/A.T. Kearney

• National Westminster Bank

Major Sponsor

• Union Bank of Switzerland

Regular Sponsors

• AMP

• Eli Lilly

• LG Electronics

• McKinsey & Company

• Siemens Nixdorf

• Siemens PCN

We also express gratitude to the many executives from sponsor firms and other companies, as well as scholars and experts from a variety of institutions, who commented on earlier versions of the MIT scenarios. In particular, we thank those who attended the MIT Industrial Liaison scenarios program in May 1994, the Sloan-Price Waterhouse Thought Summit in October 1994 and the MIT-Global Business Network WorldView meeting in November 1995.

We are also grateful to Charlie Fine, Bill Hanson, Bengt Holmstr m, Thomas Kochan, Wanda Orlikowski, and Jack Rockart of the Sloan faculty, David Tennenhouse of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and Sloan doctoral students Andreas Gast and Albert Wenger, who generously commented on early drafts of this paper. The work was also informed by discussions in the 21st Century Initiative faculty seminar on Inter-organizational Relationships held during the Spring of 1996.