Well known technology and market research company Forrester have released a paper titled ‘Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds’.

If you’ve got a spare $249.00 (US) you can read the full report, but otherwise you’ll have to be happy with the executive summary supplied. Although far from a new claim, the key one in the summary is that “within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today”.

It’s a message most businesses either can’t or won’t digest. A lot of businesses are unable to see beyond immediate return on investment and combine that with the cutting edge nature of virtual worlds and you have the slow adoption occurring now. The corporations who are taking the plunge have rightly realised it’s a research and development exercise. Of course, the true virtual business innovators are the thousands of small businesses running every day in worlds like Second Life. The larger real-world entities could learn quite a bit from the home-based virtual world entrepreneurs.