ROBERT LAUBACHER

Associate Director/Research Scientist
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
245 First Street, E94-1509
Cambridge, MA 02142 617-253-0526
rjl@mit.edu

 

Headshot of Robert Laubacher

My research at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) examines how technological innovations—most notably the development of Internet and advances in artificial intelligence—are transforming work, organizational practices, and social patterns.

My current project seeks to develop an ontology of work activities, akin to the taxonomy of living being developed by the biologist Linnaeus, to better understand how tasks can be organized in new ways.

Prior work has:

I came to MIT in the late 1990s to join the Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century (21C), which examined how information technology was transforming business organizations and how those changes were reshaping employment arrangements.

I subsequently worked on projects that examined how information technology generates organizational benefits and how the structure of social networks affects the performance of work groups.

I’ve published articles based on my research in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Financial Times, Boston Globe, pbs.org, and many academic journals. I co-edited a collection published by MIT Press, Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century (2003). My work has also been featured on National Public Radio and in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company.

While at MIT, I served as Executive Producer of Home Before Dark, named best American independent film at the 1997 Hamptons International Film Festival and recipient of critical acclaim in Variety, the New York Times, and Boston Globe.

I have an undergraduate degree in American Studies from Northwestern and earned a master’s degree and completed doctoral coursework in modern history at Harvard.

Selected publications

 

Press