Building a business around group support technology

As the importance of group work gains recognition, entrepreneurs and corporations are evaluating the feasibility of offering technology-assisted meeting and planning applications to the general business community. This paper presents one corporation´s decisions, experiences and lessons learned in building a business offering around group support technology. The primary focus is on describing the process and considerations in establishing a group support system (GSS) as a commercial venture. To determine if there are significantly different user perceptions of the value of technology-assisted meetings between firms of offering free internal support and a for-hire corporation, participant evaluation data is compared with the results presented in a recent paper reporting experiences in a major aeronautics company.<>