Andrew McAfee (US)

Andrew McAfee is an associate director at MIT’s Center for Digital Business where he co-founded their Initiative on the Digital Economy and specialises in technological development and its broader effects.

Having studied at MIT and Harvard Business School, Andrew returned to MIT to teach and research areas around the intersection of technology and business. Andrew coined the term ‘enterprise 2.0’ to describe how businesses were adapting to a world of user-generated internet and social media. He used the phrase as the title of his first book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges which looked both at new technologies and computer science, as well economics, sociology, psychology and management.

His second book, co-written with Erik Brynjolfsson, was Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, where the two studied real examples and trends to demonstrate how the average American worker was being left behind by technology and the medium-to-long-term effects that could have.

The pair collaborated again for The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies which expanded their thoughts on how technological advances could accelerate in the coming years and the potentially huge advantages, but also bewildering changes to companies, jobs, and individuals.

Andrew is now acclaimed as one of the most influential thinkers in technology and business IT with his thoughtful, insightful analysis of how developments have changed and could change commerce and society both for the better and the worse.