Corporations Now Present At Second Life
- American Apparel
- Cisco
- Coca Cola
- Coldwell Banker
- Dell
- Harvard
- IBM
- Lego
- Nike
- PA Consutling
- Reuters
- Scion (Toyota)
- Starwood Hotels
- Sun Microsystems
- Telus
- Vodafone
- …
See Lego’s video:
IBM is probably the most prevalent example. For instance, I just received in the mail IBM’s “Expanding The Innovation Horizon“, which is the print version of the 2006 Global CEO Study. The document highlights not only the value of innovation, but also the need for innovative practices to come up with compelling breakthroughs at the top of CEO’s agendas. Cross-functional and external collaboration seen as one of the most important factors.
Note that some of IBM’s “Collaborative Jams” are taking place at Second Life. As mentioned in my previous blog, they are rapidly growing their presence at Second Life as well as the scope of activities involving customers. As an example, one of their teams is working on a project with Orange – France Telecom in a private area, which I couldn’t obviously access.
PA Consulting interviewed and hired Alex Kingsbury’s avatar at Second Life. This consulting firm has created prototypes of an intelligent home and a virtual bank branch to explore what designs would make the most sense to incorporate in actual brick and mortar locations.
Toyota is focusing on the Scion models. My understanding is that they are trying to capture lead user innovation, looking for people who are actually personalizing their cars with add-ons, and figuring out which new features can become trend setters.
“One of the odder places attracting business interest is Linden Lab’s Second Life, a virtual world where avatars -3D cartoon representation of players- live, love, and try to get rich (…) But for all of the buzz, it’s not clear (to Stephen H. Wildstrom) that Second Life is much of a business investment. Linden Labs claims 5.2 million residents, but only 1.6 million have logged on in the past two months, and there are generally fewer than 50,000 around at any one time”
Read Stephen H. Wildstrom’s “Harnessing Social Networks” on BusinessWeek.
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