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Machine, Platform, Crowd explains how digital technologies are changing the ways that companies organise themselves, perform, improve and compete. A users guide to the digital economy from the authors of The Second Machine Age.

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We are living in strange times: the largest taxi company owns no vehicles and employs no drivers, software can quickly reach super-human performance at games whose rules and strategies it never learned and people can now execute complex financial transactions without banks, courts or trust. Digital disruptions stem from three main sources: the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd. In all three cases, technological progress is shifting the balance by stressing the second element of the pair. A machine recently beat the worlds best mind at Go. Platforms built by Apple and Google outcompete excellent products by Nokia and Motorola. When the open innovation of the crowd goes head to head with corporate research and development labs, which make up the core, they often win. Machine, Platform, Crowd reveals how these digital technologies are transforming the ways in which companies perform.

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Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics. Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and the author of Enterprise 2.0.

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