Thomas W. Malone

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Thomas W. Malone

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Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. At MIT, he is also a Professor of Information Technology and a Professor of Work and Organizational Studies. Previously, he was the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding codirectors of the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Malone teaches classes on organizational design, information technology, and leadership, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

Malone predicted in an article published in 1987 many of the major developments in electronic business over the following 25 years, including electronic buying and selling for many kinds of products. In 2004, Malone summarized two decades of his research in his critically acclaimed book, The Future of Work. His newest book, Superminds, appeared in May 2018. Malone has also published over 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters. He is the coeditor of four books.

Malone has been a cofounder of four software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. He is also an inventor with 11 patents.

His background includes work as a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a PhD from Stanford University, an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and psychology.

 

Honors

Malone named as Honorary Fellow of Argentinian Engineers Center

Publications

Featured Publication
Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together.

Malone, Thomas W. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.

"20 Years of Research in Electronic Markets and Networked Business: An Interview with Thomas Malone."

Wigand, R. and Thomas W. Malone. Electronic Markets Vol. 21, No. 1 (2011): 5-17.

"Agents for Information Sharing and Coordination: A History and Some Reflections."

Malone, Thomas W., K. Y. Lai and K. R. Grant. In Software Agents, edited by J. M. Bradshaw, 109-143 . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

"Analogies Between Human Organizations and Artificial Intelligence Systems: Two Examples and Some Reflections."

Malone, Thomas W. In Artificial Intelligence in Organization and Management Theory: Models of Distributed Activity, edited by M. Masuch and M. Warglien, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North Holland, 1992.

"Answer Garden: A Tool for Growing Organizational Memory."

Mark S. Ackerman and Thomas W. Malone. In COCS '90 Proceedings of the ACM SIGOIS and IEEE CS TC-OA conference on Office information systems, edited by Frederick H. Lochovsky and Robert B. Allen. New York, NY: April 1990.

"Broad Participation in Collective Problem Solving can Influence Participants and Lead to Better Solutions:  Evidence from the MIT Climate CoLab."

Eric Duhaime, Gary M. Olson, and Thomas Malone. In Proceedings of Collective Intelligence 2015, Santa Clara, CA: June 2015.

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