New digital technologies, particularly what we refer to as SMACIT 3 (social, mobile, analytics, cloud and Internet of things [IoT]) technologies, present both game-changing opportunities and existential threats to big old companies. GE's "industrial internet" and Philips' digital platform for personalized healthcare information represent bets made by big old companies attempting to cash

Negotiating on-line is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon in the workplace. The medium of the Internet also offers promising, opportunities for negotiation educators to reach out to participants that might otherwise be unable to attend a seminar. The authors used the Internet to teach negotiation theory and skills during a seven-week seminar that was conducted completely over the World Wide Web. This experiment revealed several advantages and difficulties likely to arise in the conduct of "distance learning'' for topics in negotiation. The authors reflect on how they would organise the seminar differently, should they do it again, and offer suggestions far others organizing courses using the Internet.In recent years, there has been an increased interest in using the Internet as a medium for teaching negotiation skills. The advantages of electronic mail, (i.e., people can read or send mail whenever it is most convenient for them, and a person can easily send the same message to several people) are especially well suited for learning environments in which the participants are dispersed around the world, have complex work schedules, and are unable to take even a few days from work to attend a professional seminar. How- Robert B. McKersie is Sloan Fellows Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology's Sloan School of Management, Room E52-589, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. Nils Fonstad is also at the Sloan School, as a doctoral student in Information Technologies and Organization Studies. He is working on the processes of multi-party negotiation and coordination within the context of organization studies, and the rote of information technologies in those processes.

The authors introduce a group of essays that evolved from a March 2003 symposium on the path-breaking new partnership and use of interest-based negotiation (IBN) at Kaiser Permanente (KP), one of the largest integrated health care programs in the United States. They briefly trace the history of the IBN approach (both success stories and failures); the growth of this phenomenon; and its use in collective bargaining settings. The KP case, the focus of the symposium (which was jointly sponsored by MIT's Institute for Work and Employment Relations and Harvard's Program on Negotiation), is by far the largest instance of the use of IBN in U.S. labor relations history.

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