In recent years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been replaced by new and innovative collaboration methods, on an ever-increasing scale.
Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything has definitely stimulated discussion. First published in 2006, the book explores how some modern businesses collaborate en masse and use open source technology like wikis to succeed.
According to the authors, Wikinomics is based on four key ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing and Acting globally. The use of crowdsourcing in a business environment, in recent history, can be seen as an extension of the trend to outsource business functions.
Based on a $9 million research project, Wikinomics shows how everyone can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for diseases, editing school textbooks, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles.
Furthermore, the book challenges the status quo and questions whether success can be achieved in less structured ways. In many ways, it emphasizes the trend of customer-driven power.
To illustrate these points, Wikinomics cites traditional business approaches. Throughout history, corporations have been organized along strict lines of authority. Everyone was inferior to everyone else: employees vs. managers, vendors vs. customers, producers vs. supply chain subcontractors, businesses vs. the community.
While hierarchies are not going away, massive changes in technology, demographics, and the global economy are producing influential new models of production based on community, collaboration, and self-organization rather than hierarchy. Mass collaboration is based on individual agents free to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem. Much of this is the result of our growing global Internet-based culture.
While some leaders fear the rapid growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics shows that this fear is unfounded. Smart companies can actually use collective talent and genius to drive innovation, growth, and success.
Who are these pioneering companies? Companies like Boeing, BMW, and Procter & Gamble have been around for nearly a century. And yet, its leaders use collaboration as a way to reduce costs, innovate, co-create with customers and partners, and stay ahead of competitors. Wikinomics shares several of these stories, citing the explosive growth of phenomena like MySpace, Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and the Human Genome Project.
Does Wikinomics reflect a substantial new economic trend or just another wave of innovation? Regardless, mass collaboration is taking hold. In truly collaborative fashion, the latest chapter is written by viewers and opened for editing on February 5, 2007.
