| | |  | Mike Bonifer | Home » » Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything | | | | | | | Description: | | In just the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century. Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You'll read about: • Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.
• Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.
• Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.
An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Don Tapscott | | Hardcover:
| 320 pages | | Publisher:
| Portfolio Hardcover | | Publication Date:
| December 28, 2006 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1591841380 | | Package Length:
| 9.1 inches | | Package Width:
| 6.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.2 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 109 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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 Wikinomics In A NutshellOct 23, 2009
Here is the mass collaboration framework presented by Wikinomics in a nutshell:
- Generate revenue from support, training, and consulting on a limited set of dimensions of value that matter most to customers
- Determine how participants will capture value (monetary or non-monetary value) for their contribution
--> Non monetary sources include prestige & social belonging
--> Allow others to extend and add services
- Assume everything digital is free and replicable
- Outsource everything non-strategic
- Interoperate with other open systems (in both directions)
- Successful communities require:
--> A core group to guide, integrate, and manage exceptions to processes
--> Mechanisms for quality control
--> Self selecting and self replenishing
--> Constant communication
--> Systems that are modular, reconfigurable, and editable
Though I summarize the books I read, I always recommend that folks buy the book for themselves to get the full benefit and to support the author's endeavors. As other reviewers have noted, this is slow and sometimes repetitive read. However, when you step back from it, you observe a nice framework for applying mass collaboration to your existing or future business. The authors do this deftly through examples that span gold mining to healthcare to social media.
Important, though long-windedAug 17, 2009
This is an important book that talks about the potential that global webs of collaboration, global platforms, and global manufacturing plant forms have to unleash creativity and profit.
Here are the pluses and minuses.
The Minuses:
First, the book is too long. A good technical editor could easily pare 1/3 out, and the authors would still make the same point.
Second, somewhere along the line Penguin abandoned most uses of the comma. You can see it in most of their recent books, and this is a problem. It makes sentence mechanics less precise and sentences much harder to read. Again, a technical editor could go through this book and make it more readable.
Third, some sections are unnecessarily dense. Some of the nomanilized verbs (ex. verbs turned into nouns using "tion") are priceless. I have no doubt they will end up in the Hall of Fame at the Society for Technical Communication.
Fourth, some sections repeat earlier material ad nauseum.
Fifth, the authors bury each chapter thesis at the end of the chapter. If you are writing technical text, please do not do this. Tell me your thesis up front. Then, I may decide whether or not I want to wade through your following arguments. Imagine how much easier would our reading lives be if everybody built written arguments like this.
The Pluses:
The authors present important thinking on the present transformation of business through interactive communication. People working without global barriers may lead to positive economies of scale, with high levels of creativity never seen before.
The Bottom Line:
Read this book. Despite its density, the points are important. You can knock out the book in a few weeks of casual reading. Yes it is dense, and some sections simply restate earlier material to death, but this may be because we now live in uncharted waters. Maybe some points bear repeating.
My biggest concern is this book does not present a balanced picture. It talks only in glowing, positive terms about the reality of webs of collaboration. It never addresses the negative externalities that result. And as the late neo-Luddite Neil Postman wrote, every new technology solves old problems while creating new problems. What new problems will result from all this technology based collaboration?
For example, were all module suppliers for the Boeing 787 able to deliver on their contracts, especially in the wake of our current global economic recession-depression?
Who bears the costs of negative externalities? For example, how much pollution do Boeing's suppliers create when shipping modules from Australia or Japan to Washington state? Who pays these costs? How much fuel is burned up moving modules from one place to another? Wouldn't it be less polluting and more efficient for these companies to build plants in Washington state?
What are the negative effects of such profound economies of scale (EOS) during economic downturns, like now? We saw similar EOS almost wipe out whole industries. Herbert Spencer, the early sociologist, would tell us to ignore it, that it's a cycle of nature that leads to stronger human institutions. Maybe so. But, it also can and does lead to real human suffering. I don't know about others, but I do not feel consoled by being able to Facebook or Twitter about environmental and human devastation wrought by global EOS.
Finally, what is the potential for one supplier in a chain of modules to hold out for ransom before delivery? With such a duck soup of global contractual law, I think a very real potential exists for this. It's not like you can run down to the Home Depot or the next competitor to replace the module. Remember, as Tapscott and Williams write that suppliers continually re-engineer the modules. A sponsoring company like Boeing may hold no proprietary rights, or may not have the core information that lets it re-create the module.
This is all dicey to say the lest; yet, none of it is remotely approached in the first edition of the book. If not in the second edition, the third edition must also contain critiques or, minimally, questions about the potential negatives.
Mass collaboration doesn't change everythingJul 27, 2009
The assertion that mass collaboration changes everything is an ambitious one. The authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, certainly have the pedigree of academia, business experience and literary successes behind them, so their arguments hold significant weight. They have obviously conducted extensive research over a number of years, and do provide plenty of relevant and enlightening case studies to support their arguments.
It is easy to see why technological breakthroughs such as personal computers, the internet and more recently the collaborative internet, have brought us to this point where so many people can chose to participate in the creative process. Taking this all into consideration, the authors managed to convince me of the power of collaboration in such industries as software development and scientific research. Both these industries can be characterised by large communities of people that are willing to devote their time and effort to solving problems collaboratively. Not for profit, but simply for recognition or through altruism.
Where the authors fail to convince is in the belief that businesses of all types and in all industries, will perish if they don't embrace this concept of using collaborative effort to achieve business goals. They fail to provide clear benefits for an organisation to expose their intellectual property to the wide collaborative community.
There are definitely benefits to consumers: often the result can be free, or nearly free products, or the opportunity to participate in the design of a product. But where are the benefits to the organisation that makes this giant leap of faith? Business is about making a profit for the shareholders. This is achieved through competitive advantage. But Tapscott and Williams fail to convince that a company can achieve competitive advantage through exposing their valuable intellectual property to anyone who wishes to participate.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 meh...Jul 11, 2009
Like most business books of the moment, Wikinomics is pretty stale by now. Couldn't get past the first 20 pages. Why? Apart from the barrage of buzzwords and hard selling of 'collaboration', the examples and concepts are pretty ancient. Want the 1 sentence summary of Wikinomics? Here goes - Collaboration opens the doors of success for dis-aggregated businesses. Yes, brilliant. Now save your money...
 This is about much more than Wiki-anythingJul 11, 2009
Excellent investigation of the evolution of business from centralized and top-down towards distributed and bottom-up. I think the title under-sells it; this is about much more than Wiki-anything, but about the power of concentrating on your strengths, and being confident enough to allow others to do the same, to common benefit. A must read for independent and intra-corporate entrepreneurs.
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