Wikinomics -Mass collaboration

It is indeed a nice book on mass collaboration and how it changes everything. Written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Interestingly John praised this book as well. The other book John praised is 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman. If you get a chance, do read both.

The success of the LAMP stack ( the open source web platform consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) is pretty much due to mass collaboration effort and considering its huge potential, IBM selected most of them in their high-end products. OS/2 was a flop and hence it was much cheaper to go with Linux.

In order to succeed in 21st century world, product has to be opened for participation. One of the example was SAP who recently went through the process of opening up 30,000 APIs to its market-leading enterprise software platforms.

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere- ocw.mit.edu.

Another interesting incident was GoldCorp shared its secret mine excavation reports to Internet and asked experts to provide professional advise on where is the most probable spot for gold mining. The expert exchange helped this firm to survive. Same thing followed in similar path by BMW, Boeing,and Procter and Gamble for seeking expert opinions from anywhere globally. P&G uses http://www.innocentive.com/ for 50% of their new product's R&D.

Google Eric mentions" When you say collaboration, the average 45-year old thinks they know that you are talking about - teams sitting down, having a nice conversation with nice objectives and a nice attitude. That is what collaboration means to most people".

However 21Th century collaboration is radically different. It is peer production where human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously. And in the years to come, this new mode of peer production will displace traditional corporation hierarchies as they key engine of wealth creation in the economy.

Web 2.0 - the new web is not a noun, but a verb - living web.
Conventional wisdom says combines innovate, differentiate and compete by doing certain things right; by having superior human capital; protecting their intellectual property fiercely; focusing on customers; thinking globally but acting locally; and examining well.

The new art and science of new economy is based on four powerful ideas - openness, peering, sharing and acting globally.

7 new models of mass collaboration listed in the book, that challenged traditional business paradox.

1.Peer pioneers - the people who brought you open source software and Wikipedia

2. Ideagoras - explains how an emerging marketplace for ideas and inventions.

3. Prosumers - takes you increasingly dynamic world of customer innovation

4. New Alexandrians - who bring you to speed with a new science of sharing. Sharing for science and the science of sharing.


5. Platform for participation - explains how smart companies are opening up their products and technology to create an open stage where large communities of partners can create value and in many cases, create new business. All the world is a stage and you are the star.

6. Global plant floor show how even manufacturing-intensive industries are giving rise to planetary ecosystems for seizing and building physical goods, marking a new phase in the evolution of mass collaboration

7. Wiki Workplace - wraps up the journey with a look at how mass collaboration in taking root in the workplace. Unleashing the power of Us. Collaborative minds - the power of thinking differently.

20th century firms brought innovation within their boundaries for good reasons - R&D was closely aligned with the firms' existing proprietary product and process technologies, its strategy for staying ahead and its market opportunity as it saw them.

Wikinomics design principles:

Taking cues from your lead users
Building critical mass
Supplying an infrastructure for collaboration
Take your time to get the structures and governess right.
Make sure all participating can harvest some value
Abide by community norms
Let the process evolve
Hone your collaboration mind

Few good sites mentioned in the book:

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