21st Century Book Club

Work With Me, Here: A Stab at Executive Summaries

Wikinomics; How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Dear Colleagues,

I understand that you were all busy this past week with various jobs at home and work. That said, I’ve taken the liberty to write this very, very concise summary of Wikinomics so that you won’t need to battle the thick chapters and never-ending anecdotes yourselves. Now, I’m writing this in the hopes of delivering just the facts; I want the summary to be just as good as reading the whole book. So, here’s my first attempt at a bare bones account of Wikinomics.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams use a multifaceted approach at defining their main concept, mass collaboration, with a myriad of anecdotes from a long and diverse list of company executives (e.g., Google, Apple, The Human Genome Project, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, and IBM). They use the term “wikinomics” to describe the new era of mass collaboration, built on four principles: “openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.” Although these concepts are familiar to most, the point is that in the new era, the magnitude with which they are used is greater than ever.

The bulk of the book discusses seven models that embody the four principles:

1. Peer Pioneers. The new generation of internauts is quite different from their predecessors. They don’t just make websites for others to read, they harness mass collaboration by using wikis (internet tools which allow for public editing) and opening their ideas to everyone. Two prime examples are Wikipedia and Linux. The three conditions that best harness peering are: “1) The object of production is information or culture, which keeps the cost of participation low […] 2) Tasks can be chunked out into bite-size pieces that individuals can contribute in small incremens and independently of other producers […] And, finally, 3) The costs of integrating those pieces into a finished end product […] must be low.”
2. Ideagoras. There exists a new marketplace where innovation can be bought or sold (e.g., InnoCentive) in the new era of mass collaboration. These eBay’s for invention cut costs and efficiently allocate R&D for who are looking for “solutions to questions” or “questions to solutions.” It has helped companies like P&G save billions of dollars on R&D and patenting, by giving smaller companies a chance to research P&G’s stagnant projects, while also helping P&G find better and cheaper methods of solving their biggest research issues.
3. Prosumers. Mass collaboration has turned consumers into “prosumers,” customers that co-produce their products. For years consumers have customized their purchases (like iPods or Legos) by tinkering with products, in most cases, illegally. In the new era, companies should no longer penalize the act, but rather encourage it. A good example is Legos. The company now allows consumers to co-produce their purchases via the Internet.
4. The New Alexandrians. Science 2.0 is emerging; they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. With open projects like the Human Genome Project allowing for mass collaboration, advancements in human health, environmental issues, and new technologies have accelerated at an exponential rate. Organizations can tap into the world as their resource, finding genius solutions in places outside of their walls.
5. Platforms for Participation. Platforms can be anything from a Web service (Google) to an e-commerce system (Amazon). Anyone can combine platforms to make a new type of Web tool. Paul Rademacher’s housingmaps is a combination of Google Maps and craigslist ads for houses, which he made and shares with the world. There are still some legality issues with these platform combinations; Tapscott and Williams emphasize the significance of finding the right balance between being completely open (and vulnerable to too much piracy) and completely closed (falling behind).
6. The Global Plant Floor. Mass collaboration is also at the forefront of assembling physical goods as well. Recently, decentralized networks have been doing more and more designing and producing. Open source methods of software collaboration (like in 2) are finding a way into the physical realm of automobiles and airplanes. As this is happening, a global plan floor is slowly replacing smaller industrial assembly-line factories around the world.
7. The Wiki Workplace. The final model explains how to translate all the aforementioned information into the workplace. Service companies like Geek Squad (currently owned by Best Buy) can use wikis, and other collaboration technologies used by peer communities like Facebook or MySpace, within the workplace to share ideas between offices at unparalleled speeds. This kind of transparency within a company is most efficient, because it cuts down on repetition of information and encourages collaboration.

There are three key lessons to take away from this book. The first is that the new “wikonomy” (wiki + economy) still needs managers to guide it. The obsolescence of hierarchy certainly should/does not lead to anarchy. The second is that, according to Coase’s Law, profits are not from lucrative sales. Rather, they are from cutting costs in the new ear. Mass collaboration is the most efficient way to transfer knowledge and expertise, while drastically cutting down on costs; in every example in the book, monetary gains are in the form of cost cutting. The final key lesson from this book spurs from its critics. Many roll their eyes at the book and claim that “the new era of mass collaboration” is just a fad—a renaming of old concepts. However, what critics fail to see is that although the concepts are not new, they are used on a much larger scale, and that is the point that Tapscott and Williams makes. We all know that globalization and the Internet bring information and even continents to our fingertips, but how may be best refine our skills at mass collaboration? How may be harness it? How do we balance the old views embedded in ourselves with the new ones vying for attention? Through anecdotal examples, Tapscott and Williams answer these questions. This is their contribution, and this is why it is a must-read.