Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
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the last few years, traditional collaboration?in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center?has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.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.
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything Accessories
 The Wisdom of Crowds
The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything Reviews
The cover is dirty, the spine is loose, and there is a black permanent ink slash mark on the bottom of the book across the pages). I ordered a new copy of this book and the book I received looks used. I was going to give this book as a gift but decided against it because of the poor condition.
I would have preferred to be told behorehand that there was writing in the book itself. But other than, I was pleased with the speed of delivery and the book.
This book is especially valuable to business administrators who need a view into the new way of doing things, and a cabinet full of empirical evidence to sell stockholders and board members on why opportunity is awaiting engagement: collaboration as an effective business model, with financial and social dividends. This book stimulates ideological discussions about where we can go as a society, without the weight of the baggage of where we have been. But, this text is not a head -in-the-clouds wish list. This book is an excellent document, enfolding the how of the new media landscape and tool set, how they have allowed for a shift in collective progress, connecting people with ideas and broadcasting to the masses. And mass collaboration does change everything: education, business, science, politics, communication. This book uses case studies and comprehensive language and organization to fire up the human spirit, rekindling the optimism of our culture and society's future potential, and the contemporary realization of that potential. Wikinomics is a perspective into the organic evolution of information and communication, a map of the affects the new tools and methods have had on everything.
Thanks Tapscott, it really didn't sink in the first time, but now that you've repeated yourself and added an exclamation point, I'm blown away. They were clearly in a hurry to get Wikinomics the shelves before someone beat them to the punch with "The Wiki Point." Yes, blown away. The following comes from page 103: "In the late 1990s P&G launched an internal survey and discovered it was spending $1.5 billion on R&D, generating lots of patents, but using less than 10 percent of them in it's own products. this is the kind of tripe Taleb rails on. It's not in the same class with that, or the Long Tail, Gladwell's books, Wisdom of Crowds, etc. Don't bother to mentioning whether or not this is a reasonable number, how it compares to others in the industry, other industries that do more or less collaboration, or any other metrics to provide context for this statement. The authors are hacks.
The authors build a case for various forms of collaboration using anecdotes and a few statistics (w/ fewer references). Yes, that's less than 10 percent.". This is the worst kind of pseudoscience, and it's way too long. The smartest thing the authors did was to create a title that rides Freakonomics' coat tails. They never even explicitly show how this number changes as a result of collaboration. Before the reader has a chance to ask "how do I know collaboration was the factor that accelerated this company's growth" or "what else might have been going wrong at the other company" the authors quickly make up a few scientific sounding words and speak in broad generalizations about what successful companies of the future will do.
It could be helpful, though, if you are new to the topic and would like to understand what "emergence", "wikis" and "prosumers" mean and how the term "knowledge" is changing in meaning. As has already been stated, the view of the world of mass collaboration presented in this book is rather simplistic.
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