New Site to Collect Dot-Com Era Blueprints

The University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and Webmergers.com have launched the Business Plan Archive (BPA), a Web-based initiative designed to create a permanent record of the historic dot-com era. The BPA is part of a major Smith School research project on the dot-com boom and bust period of the late 1990s. The web site will collect business-planning documents that entrepreneurs and researchers can use to learn from past business successes and failures. The Business Plan Archive site enables former executives, employees, investors, and customers who participated in the Internet boom and bust to submit business plans, marketing plans, technical plans, venture presentations, and other business documents from failed and successful Internet start-ups.

"If we do not act now to document the dot-com happenings of the past several years, many of the events and firms that helped define the period will be forgotten," said David Kirsch, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business, and head of the research project. "We must create a meaningful digital archive of this historic era of entrepreneurship. The business plans of the 1990s are important cultural products that represent the creative efforts of our age."

The archive will collect such materials as e-mails, PowerPoint slide presentations, audio files, Java applets, and other electronic documentation. BPA partner, Webmergers.com, a San Francisco-based research firm, will contribute data and analysis from its extensive database of information on technology mergers and acquisitions and dot-com shutdowns and bankruptcies.

"It has been said that those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it," said Tim Miller, president of Webmergers.com. "By collecting the blueprints of both failed and successful businesses, we hope to create the raw materials for that learning to take place."

"While the Internet has allowed everyone to gain access to a multitude of documents from the past, it will be interesting to turn these online tools to the task of helping us understand the blossoming of the Internet itself," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that records Web pages for historical purposes.

The BPA is part of a much larger archive being assembled by Kirsch. His project, which is funded through a $300,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will also document the personal experiences and accounts of the "refugees" or "working class" of the Internet boom and bust. Kirsch expects to conduct hundreds of interviews to capture these personal recollections. This information, as well as the business-planning documents, will be archived and permanently housed at the Archives and Manuscripts Department of the University of Maryland Libraries.

"The over-arching goal of the project is to understand how people learn from failure," said Kirsch. "Both organizations and individuals carry the scars of the battles they have fought, but the specific learning pathways that connect the experience of failure to subsequent behavioral change have not yet been carefully explained."