Excerpted from
"Second Life has become a platform for collaboration and business that bypasses traditional geographic constraints, propelling several key shifts. First, Second Life demonstrates the power of using place within a communications medium, allowing distant participants to leverage real-world metaphors and habits to improve collaboration. Thus, participation no longer depends on a person being co-located with a project or other team members...

Second, virtual worlds lower the cost of learning, a critical driver of innovation. Both amateur-to-amateur and professional training have flourished in Second Life. The emergence of virtual worlds as places to acquire, share, and build knowledge dramatically impact the rate of innovation for all who use them...

A third shift involves the range of impact. Virtual worlds can change innovation everywhere. By creating a culture of experimentation, exploration, and collaboration, Second Life makes radically decentralized approaches, reduced costs, and collaboration across great geographic distance available to those with access. Instances of these powerfully transformative activities exist in both education and large corporations. As the Internet revolution has demonstrated, changing the substrate for innovation has the potential for greater impact than any localized
change.

Finally, virtual worlds will change the alignment of labor markets and the shapes of large organizations, including nation-states."

Labels: Second Life