Ranjay Gulati likens his research into the frenetic world of e-commerce to the tale of 10 blind men examining an elephant.

"One man says, 'I think this is the tail.' Another says, 'I think this is the trunk.' It's the same with my research. Things are happening so quickly in e-commerce. My challenge is to understand each new development while trying to figure out the whole animal," Gulati says.

For the past two years, Gulati has studied how Internet start-ups develop strategies to grow their businesses, and how traditional companies enter the online economy.

Gulati, associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, teaches students and executives how high-technology companies are managed. As a result, he is gaining the same recognition for his research and instruction into e-commerce that he received for his earlier study of strategic alliances.

Gulati believes his 15 years of research into organizations prepared him well for the study of e-commerce. He has published extensively on the formation and strategy of corporate alliances. His recent research examines managerial influences on alliance performance and has developed tools to help managers select better alliances. This point proves critical since Gulati notes that fifty percent of alliances fail, yet firms still enter into them in record numbers.

When he looked at Internet business practices, Gulati discovered that his research was readily applicable to e-commerce.

"Much of what dot-com companies are concerned about is what I was already doing, he says. "They are concerned about alliances. They are concerned about how to manage their organizations and developing strategies to maintain a sustainable advantage."

Gulati also realized that established companies had their own sets of strategic and organizational concerns as they began conducting business on the Internet.

"Brick-and-mortar companies face many issues as they struggle to become 'click-and-mortars,'" he says. "Traditional ways of doing business don't always work in e-commerce. You have to worry about issues like channel conflict--will your Internet sales steal sales from your traditional business?"

In a forthcoming Harvard Business Review paper, Gulati examines the tradeoffs firms face in developing an Internet strategy. He suggests that while creating spinoff organizations allows firms to create an Internet presence, other alternatives include partnering with a start-up or creating a new in-house division. Underlying these choices is the issue of balancing the tradeoffs between creating separation from the parent entity and integrating with it.

Gulati's "The Fall and Rise of Disinfomediators" examines how traditional Web intermediaries such as Travelocity and Autobytel rattled travel agents and auto dealers by enabling customers to buy airline ticket and cars on the Internet, and are now themselves facing threats from new competition.

"If there's one overriding theme of this age of competition," Gulati writes in the paper, "it's the race to provide the customer with exactly what she wants."

Gulati cites his biggest challenge as staying current with the Internet's rapid development. "You have to be a prolific reader, a prolific observer and you have to be able to look at a world that is really messy and distill an understandable set of concepts from it," he says.

To perform this synthesis, Gulati relies on his students and colleagues, and his own experience. He directs a team of researchers, and finds that his executive education and corporate consulting serve to sharpen his insights. He says teaching several new e-commerce courses ensures that his knowledge remains current.

Gulati plans to delve deeper into research on the network economy by launching a project to study every initial public offering by Internet-related firms since 1994, determining their rates of success and the associated influential factors.

Meanwhile, Gulati will edit Digital Strategy and Organizations (with Kellogg's Mohanbir Sawhney). The demand for credible information on e-commerce is so great that Gulati does not believe he can afford to slow down.