Product Description

An updated edition of the national bestseller—now with a new introduction and a new chapter

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

• Amazon Sales Rank: #247679 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-17
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The word "wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian, and here author and think tank CEO Tapscott (The Naked Corporation), along with research director Williams, paint in vibrant colors the quickly changing world of Internet togetherness, also known as mass or global collaboration, and what those changes mean for business and technology. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written, compiled, edited and re-edited by "ordinary people" is the most ubiquitous example, and its history makes remarkable reading. But also considered are lesser-known success stories of global collaboration that star Procter & Gamble, BMW, Lego and a host of software and niche companies. Problems arise when the authors indulge an outsized sense of scope-"this may be the birth of a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance, or the rise of Athenian democracy"-while acknowledging only reluctantly the caveats of weighty sources like Microsoft's Bill Gates. Methods for exploiting the power of collaborative production are outlined throughout, an alluring compendium of ways to throw open previously guarded intellectual property and to invite in previously unavailable ideas that hide within the populace at large. This clear and meticulously researched primer gives business leaders big leg up on mass collaboration possibilities; as such, it makes a fine next-step companion piece to James Surowiecki's 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Anyone who has done even a modest amount of browsing on the Internet has probably run across Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia that now dwarfs the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica. This is the prime example of what is called the new Web, or Web 2.0, where sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and even the Human Genome Project allow mass collaboration from participants in the online community. These open systems can produce faster and more powerful results than the traditional closed proprietary systems that have been the norm for private industry and educational institutions. Detractors claim that authentic voices are being overrun by "an anonymous tide of mass mediocrity," and private industry laments that competition from the free goods and services created by the masses compete with proprietary marketplace offerings. The most obvious example of this is Linux, the open-source operating system that has killed Microsoft in the server environment. But is this a bad thing? Tapscott thinks not; and as a proponent of peering, sharing, and open-source thinking, he has presented a clear and exciting preview of how peer innovation will change everything. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Wikinomics heralds the biggest change in collaboration to date. Thanks to the Internet, masses of people outside the boundaries of traditional hierarchies can innovate to produce content, goods and services. In order to understand the opportunities this presents for companies, read this book. -- Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

Wikinomics will help you understand the changes, why they should be good news for businesses, and how to win in this new world. -- Gordon Nixon, CEO, Royal Bank of Canada

A MapQuest-like guide to the emerging business-to-consumer relationship. This book should be invaluable to any manager—helping us chart our way in an increasingly digital world. -- Tony Scott, senior vice president and chief information officer, The Walt Disney Company

A deeply profound and hopeful book. Wikinomics provides compelling evidence that the emerging ‘creative commons’ can be a boon, not a threat to business. Every CEO should read this book and heed its wise counsel if they want to succeed in emerging global economy. -- Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum

I am very willing to proclaim that Wikinomics is undoubtedly the best picture so far of the new world of enterprise, collaboration, innovation, and value creation. This is a breathtaking piece of work. -- Tom Peters

I love this book. Mass collaboration is most disruptive development in business in a long time. Consider Wikinomics your survival kit. -- Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext

Knowledge creation happens in social networks where people learn and teach each other. Wikinomics shows where this phenomenon is headed when turbo charged to engage the ideas and energy of customers, suppliers, and producers in mass collaboration. It's a must read for those who want a map of where the world is headed. -- Noel Tichy, professor, University of Michigan and author of Cycle of Leadership

No company today, no matter how large or how global, can innovate fast enough or big enough by itself. Wikinomics reveals the next historic step - the art and science of mass collaboration where companies open up to the world. It is an important book. -- A. G. Lafley, CEO, Procter & Gamble

Not only a superb book, but an essential one for anyone who wants to understand the major forces that will revolutionize the way organizations perform and the way they are led. -- Warren Bennis, Professor of Management, Univ. of Southern California

Wikinomics captures and explains the essential nature of the next generation of the Internet—how collaboration and communication technologies are democratizing the creation of value. An insightful and engaging book. -- John Chambers, president and CEO Cisco Systems

Customer Reviews

Warning: contains large quantites of consultantese
Don Tapscott's book, Wikinomics, discussed many excellent and interesting high-level collaboration concepts but was somewhat of a disappointment because of Tapscott's "I invented the question mark" writing style. For example, Tapscott makes an attempt to label specialized networks, like Napster, as "Business Networks" and even proceeds to call them "b-webs":

"By 2000, when the music industry finally noticed it, the MP3 b-web had reached critical mass-tens of thousands of music files had become available for downloading over the Net-and Napster alone, record companies said, had cost them $300 million in lost sales."

You mean a "peer-to-peer music network?" As a management consultant by day, I even found myself rolling my eyes at some of Don's painful attempts to coin new jargon. I felt that Tapscott lost a lot of creditability by going down this path. The title alone, "Wikinomics", and the tagline, "How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything," should have given away that the consultantese was going to be thick.

Some sections of the book, like the "tagging" reference below, were just downright funny underlining that Tapscott doesn't have a very in-depth understanding of the technologies that are powering this collaboration phenomena. This suggests that Wikinomics was not edited by a broader audience:

"Tagging harnesses a technology called XML to allow users to affix descriptive labels or keyword to content (techies call it "metadata", or data about data). Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly aptly describes a tag as a public annotation-like a keyword or category name that you hang on a file, web page, or picture. When people tag content collaboratively, it creates a "folksonomy," essentially a bottom-up, organic taxonomy that organizes content on the web"

By definition, a tag does not harness XML. In fact, the two have nothing to do with each other. You could use XML to define a tag, but you could also use a database, file system metadata, or any other symbolic system to define a tag. Almost all web applications with tagging functionality store tagging data in a database system.

While this is a very small detail that Tapscott missed, this book is riddled with many of these small "misunderstandings" making me question the author's editorial process. Maybe if Tapscott had used a wiki to let others edit his transcript, a "techie" would have caught the error and corrected it ;)

Despite the nit-picky details, I would recommend the book to somebody who has never heard of a Wiki, blog, social network or of Web 2.0. It definitely gets the brain thinking about the exciting opportunities that lay ahead for both our professional and personal lives. Many interesting and innovative cases, including some new ways Proctor & Gamble is doing business outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy, are discussed in detail.

If you can stand the consultantese, have $25 laying around, and can find a couple hours to read, definitely pick up this book. If you don't have the time for the consultantese and want to understand what's really going on, pick up the Long Tail.

---
[...]

Large look at the collaborative online world
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams have written an intriguing, necessary and, in some ways, groundbreaking book, which we recommend to everyone...with some caveats. The authors examine the possibilities of mass collaboration, open-source software and evolutionary business practices. They integrate examples from the arts ("mashups"), scholarship (Wikipedia) and even heavy industry (gold mining) to argue that new forces are reshaping human societies. Some of their examples will be familiar, but others will surprise and educate you. However, the authors are so deeply part of the world they discuss that they may inflate it at times - for instance, making the actions of a few enthusiasts sound as if they already have transformed the Internet - and they sometimes fail to provide definitions or supporting data. Is the "blogosphere," for example, really making members of the younger generation into more critical thinkers? Tapscott and Williams repeatedly dismiss criticisms of their claims or positions without answering them. The result is that the book reads at times like a guidebook, at times like a manifesto and at times like a cheerleading effort for the world the authors desire. It reads, in short, like the Wikipedia they so admire: a valuable, exciting experiment that still contains a few flaws.

A good discussion of the possibilities created by Web 2.0
Don Tapscott helped found the new economics associated with the Web with Digital Economy and Digital Capital. Wikinomics seeks the same goal using the features and functions of Web 2.0 as a basis for new forms of business collaboration and opportunity.

Tapscott takes numerous examples of next generation collaboration and social networks to point to the potential of the next generation of the web where customization, tailoring, self-publishing are viable business activities. The examples which range from assaying gold deposits to creating new rap albums are compelling. They lay the foundation for the principles of wikinomics that include:

BEING OPEN to allow customers, peers and others more access to your content, intellectual capital to collaborate and create something new.

PEERING to recognize that people form their own communities to create value, such as open source, and prefer these communities to traditional hierarchies that concentrate on control.

SHARING to overturn the economics of scarcity in favor of wide distribution and tailoring. In this regard, value comes not form distribution but from application of your products and services.

From these principles Tapscott discusses the following actors that will bring this world to the forefront of business:

1. Peer pioneers who will create the new business models based on wikinomics and found the companies that will displace both traditional companies and first generation web companies.

2. Ideagoras the creation of open forums where ideas are freely shared and developed based on attracting world class talent from around the connected world.

3. Prosumers who are a rising group of customers who will both produce and consume new products and services.

4. New Alexandrians the 'librarians' who will bring people together. In other words, the mavens that draw the Prosumers into the Ideagoras.

5. Platforms of Participation which is where the wiki economy will happen. These are places where companies open their products and platforms to enable collaboration and creation of next generation products and businesses.

6. Global Plant Floor recognizes that manufacturing has become more open and able to support mass customized products. This is essential for new products to get to market effectively.

7. Wiki Workplace the environment where people will collaborate in the future, connect and collaborate to create new sources of value.

If you have read down this far, you see both the strength and the challenges associated with this book.

Tapscott does a great job of illustrating the very real possibilities associated with the new social and collaborative capabilities provided by the web. These are real phenomenons that are currently cutting apart the music, media, financial services and just about every industry. Executives ignore these developments at their peril.

However, those possibilities are wrapped up in jargon to such an extent that they detract from the message. It is like Tapscott is trying to invent a new language for the sake of coining new terms. This is probably a manifestation of the very forces Tapscott writes about as in a `wiki' world you need to differentiate yourself, establish your brand and uniqueness. But he does so at the risk of alienating the reader who is in most need of the advice in the book. Effective communication still matters and the reason this is not a five star recommendation.

This book is good and perhaps one of the founding books for the next wave of Internet intensive business innovation. Time alone guarantees that many of the things Tapscott talks about will happen as new digital consumers gain incomes and responsibilities. The question is will you be able to go where the economy is heading, or be willing to accept the opportunity cost of staying where you are.