Leveraging the extended enterprise: : MITREs handshake tool builds virtual collaboration

The notion that we were going to crowdsource certain functions really was unheard of, says Dr Donna Cuomo, an associate director of the MITRE Corporation, a $1.4 billion nonprofit R&D organization. But a social business tool MITRE developed called Handshake is helping make that happen. The nonprofit MITRE Corporation has a unique role in research and development: The $1.4 billion organization operates federally funded research and development centers. Founded by the US Congress in 1958 to expand military-related work being done in the computer laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MITREs centers today are sponsored by some of the biggest US agencies - including the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. MITRE's R&D centers assist the United States government with scientific research and analysis, development and acquisition, and systems engineering and integration. Nurturing knowledge exchange both within each research centers community and among the centers as a group is a chief component of MITRE's mission