SPECIAL ISSUE STEPPING INTO THE INTERNET: NEW VENTURES IN VIRTUAL WORLDS Molly Wasko School of Business, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294 U.S.A. {mwasko@uab.edu} Robin Teigland Center for Strategy and Competitiveness, Stockholm School of Economics, Holländargatan 32, Stockholm, SWEDEN {robin.teigland@hhs.se} Dorothy Leidner Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, Wako, TX 76798 U.S.A. {Dorothy_Leidner@baylor.edu} Sirkka Jarvenpaa McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 U.S.A. {Sirkka.Jarvenpaa@mccombs.utexas.edu} When the call for papers for this special issue went out in the fall of 2007, there was a lot of hype around virtual worlds, with organizations such as Toyota, American Apparel, IBM, Reuters, Sun Microsystems, and Wells Fargo experimenting with Second Life as a potential platform to reach consumers. Anshe Chung was touted as the first online personality to exceed one million U.S. dollars from profits earned inside a virtual world. However, in accordance with Gartner’s hype cycle, after the initial spike in hype in 2006, virtual worlds quickly entered into the phase Gartner refers to as the “trough of disillusionment.” As enticing as the initial press reports were around the potential of virtual worlds for creating new forms of value, during the disillusionment phase individuals and organizations discovered what we have long known in MIS: if you build it, they will not necessarily come. With the publishing of this special issue in fall 2011, we are now, however, seeing the emergence of virtual worlds from the “trough of disillusionment” onto the “slope of enlighten- ment,” entering a phase where real benefits, rather than hyped expectations, are starting to hit the mainstream with poten- tially transformational technologies. Far from calls that “Second Life is dead” (Livingstone 2011), revenues in 2011 from the virtual goods industry, an industry that was virtually nonexistent a few years ago, are expected to reach $7.3 billion globally, of which $2.1 billion are projected to be in the United States (Sorom 2010). According to KZero (2011), there were 1.185 billion registered users in virtual worlds in the first quarter of 2011, more than double the number of users in 2009. The largest segment of users (561 million) is between the ages of 10 and 15 (KZero 2011). In the past year, we have seen an increase in the pace of virtual world developments, such as in open source and browser based worlds—BlueMars, OpenSim, OurBricks, realXtend, and the recent launch of Kitely—all of which are reducing the threshold to entering virtual worlds and moving the industry toward the productivity plateau. Due to the fast growth of broadband Internet access and computing power, individuals and organizations in a variety of industries are stepping into the Internet and experimenting with new ways to use virtual worlds as a complementary means to the real world for com- municating, collaborating, and organizing economic activity. MIS Quarterly Vol. 35 No. 3 pp. 645-652/September 2011 645