Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Don Tapscott & Anthony D Williams
http://www.wikinomics.com/

Wikinomics traces a dramatic shift in the way people and markets operate. Throughout history, corporations have been organized according to strict lines of hierarchy. There were managers and employees, consumers and producers, and communities and companies. Due to technology, demographical changes and the rise of the global economy (refer to Friedman’s The World is Flat) millions are now using blogs, wikis, chatrooms and personal broadcasting to influence supply chains and markets. The emerging method of web 2.0 or the world of wikinomics is mass collaboration.

Using the examples of web phenomena such as MySpace, InnoCentive, flickr, Second Life and Youtube, the author illustrates how organizations are harnessing mass collaboration to create real value for participants. Even mature firms such as Boeing, BMW, and Proctor and Gamble have seized on collaboration and self-organisation as powerful new levers to cut costs, innovate, co-create with consumers and partners to take their businesses into the 21st century environment.

The age of participation heralded by free Internet telephony, open source software and global outsourcing platforms have allowed thousands of individuals and small producers to co-create products, access markets and woo customers in ways that only large corporations could hope to do in the past. Credentialed knowledge producers now share the stage with “amateur” creators. Millions of people share their news, information and views in the blogosphere, a self-organised network of over 50 million personal commentary sites that are updated every second of the day. Some of the largest weblogs receive a half a million daily visitors, rivaling some daily newspapers. Audioblogs, podcasts and mobile photo blogs add to a dynamic up-to-the-minute stream of person-to-person news and information delivered free over the Web.

Collaboration and public spiritedness displayed through global networked projects such as FightAIDS@home are ushering in a world where knowledge, power and productive capability are more dispersed than at any time in our history – a world, where value creation will be fast, fluid and persistently disruptive – a world where only the connected will survive.