Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. At MIT, he is also a Professor of Information Technology and a Professor of Work and Organizational Studies. Previously, he was the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century."

Over many years, Malone’s research has consistently anticipated major business and technology trends by decades. For instance, he first wrote about video games and the concept that is now called “gamification” in 1980. In a 1987 article, he predicted many of the major developments in electronic buying and selling over the following 25 years. In a 1997 article, he coined the term “e-lance economy” which anticipated the term “gig economy” by two decades. In 2004, he published his critically acclaimed book, The Future of Work, long before that phrase became common. And in 2018, he published his newest book Superminds, which if history is a guide, will have again anticipated major developments in how people and computers work together in the future.

Professor Malone is the Founding Editor of the journal Collective Intelligence and the Founding Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM Collective Intelligence conference series. He has also published over 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters; he is an inventor with 12 patents; and he is a co-editor of four books. He has been a cofounder of three software companies and consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. His background also includes work as a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a Ph.D. from Stanford University, an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, and other degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and psychology.