Last week, Irene Greif (the head of CUE, the group I work in) announced that IBM is opening new Center for Social Software in Cambridge, MA. There is some press about it here and here.

The focus of the center will be on a style of research we are calling “Venture Research.”

Venture Research can be distinguished from other types of technology research by two major features. First, a venture project involves a large-scale deployment of a research project “in the wild,” for example, on the web. Typically the reason for doing a deployment to a large population is to test hypotheses about interactions between thousands of people and to allow for appropriation of the technology for unanticipated purposes.

Second, at a practical level, recruiting thousands of participants for a project means that the venture project’s application must provide a tangible value to its users. As a result, they are typically long-lasting projects and users often expect that the services will be available consistently and indefinitely. This is where the practical funding issues arise. While you can build a Web 2.0 app relatively quickly, maintaining a community of thousands, over extended periods of time takes funding that is separate and on top of base funding that supported the initial research idea’s formulation. In this way, the projects require funding more akin to venture capital — high risk, but high reward.

The reason IBM is interested in doing this style of research is that we see this scale of user interaction more the norm than the exception. As IBM is in the business of building solutions for companies, the new Center’s intention is to lead the field towards understanding how companies will communicate, interact, collaborate, and exchange at these scales of interaction.