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Wikinomics challenges old-economy business model

The premise of best-selling author Don Tapscott's new book, "Wikinomics," is a message that is either frightening or exhilarating, depending on your place in the business world and your willingness to embrace the inexorably rising tide of mass collaboration in a digitally-driven culture. Like Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" and James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds," it already has begun to wake up and shake up global organizations from top to bottom.

2007-03-14

The premise of best-selling author Don Tapscott's new book, "Wikinomics," is a message that is either frightening or exhilarating, depending on your place in the business world and your willingness to embrace the inexorably rising tide of mass collaboration in a digitally-driven culture. Like Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" and James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds," it already has begun to wake up and shake up global organizations from top to bottom. Birth of a buzzword   "A new art and science of collaboration is emerging — we call it 'wikinomics,'" Tapscott and his co-author, Anthony D. Williams announce in the first chapter. A wiki, they state, is more than just a means for many people to edit websites. "It is a metaphor for a new era of collaboration and participation " A wiki, according to the web encyclopedia that incorporates the term in its name, is "a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and otherwise edit and change content, typically without the need for registration." Wikipedia adds this about the utility of the wiki: "It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia." "Wikinomics" is based on a Tapscott and Williams' $9 million research project. Wikinomics carries a subtitle — "How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" — but consistent with the spirit of the subject matter, the authors include a preface listing many other subtitles suggested by visitors to the wikinomics.com website. These include, to name a few: Edit this Book!, Unleashing Our Collective Genius and Business (the Remix). In business, the authors write, " the old 'plan and push' mentality is rapidly giving way to a new, dynamic 'engage and co-create' economy. A hypercompetitive global economy is reshaping enterprises, and political and legal shifts loom." In other words, either get on board or sink along with old-economy ways of organizing work and innovation. Another new paradigm? Most of us already have engaged in wikinomics (based in what the authors term the New Web or Web 2.0), whether it is to scan personalized preferences at Amazon, browse videos at YouTube, create a personal profile at MySpace or Facebook, post photos at Flickr or look up an esoteric term in Wikipedia. At a higher level, ambitious students hungry for knowledge have tapped into MIT's free OpenCourseWare, programmers have contributed code to the Linux operating system and scientists have voluntarily taken part in the global project to identify and sequence all of the genes in human DNA. Tapscott and Williams have spun their treatise into a readable format that can draw in the casual reader as well as entrepreneurs and business executives looking for ideas to take the leap into wikinomics. They even wax poetic on the subject. "The New Web is fundamentally different in both its architecture and applications," reads one ecstatic descriptive. "Instead of a digital newspaper, think of a shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on. Whether people are creating, sharing or socializing, the new Web is principally about participating rather than passively receiving information." 'Jump in and have fun!'   Putting their money where their wiki is (so to speak), the authors have created a Wikinomics Playbook, in which they invite website visitors to add to or challenge the book's content — even write entire new chapters. Dubbing their book "the first peer-produced guide to business in the 21st century," they encourage readers to "jump in and have fun!" To date, they have posted two intriguing new chapters, "Mass Collaboration Beyond Individual Disciplines" and "Wikinomics Beyond Business." So engaging is Wikinomics, it has generated more than a few critics that charge oversimplification of some knottier issues posed by critical thinkers from the digital economy. Microsoft's Bill Gates is among those who have questioned the underlying premise, complaining [the authors state] that "the incentives for knowledge producers are disappearing in a world where individuals can pool their talents to create free goods that compete with proprietary marketplace offerings." In a similar vein, author Jaron Lanier has voiced his concern that collaborative communities represent a new form of "online collectivism." Tapscott and Williams refute these critics by expounding their view of mass collaboration and peer production as "really the polar opposites of the communism that Gates and Lanier despise." And indeed, it's difficult to disagree with their view of mass collaboration's social benefits, "including the opportunity to make governments more accountable and lift millions of people out of poverty." And, as to the argument that wikinomics threatens the segments of the economy dealing with profit and wealth creation, the authors have plenty of examples to the contrary: Just look at Amazon, eBay and Google. Bottom line  The "art and science of wikinomics" is based on four new ideas, according to Tapscott and Williams. These are:

• Openness — Transparency is the new black. In other words, smart companies are learning to provide unprecedented access to customers, employees, stakeholders and even competitors. This is generating a rising tide of trust, goodwill, new business partnerships, innovation and lower operating costs.
• Peering — This goes against the familiar hierarchical structure of old economy business. However, a peer-to-peer model can succeed because "it leverages self-organization — a style of organization that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks." While we can see the benefits today in the production of software and media, the authors assert there is no reason to stop there. From government to physical objects, opportunities abound.
• Sharing — The aggressive defense of intellectual property is self-defeating, the authors claim. "Smart firms are treating intellectual property like a mutual fund — they manage a balanced portfolio of IP assets, some protected and some shared." While there is a need to protect certain critical resources, companies cannot collaborate effectively if all of their IP is hidden.
• Acting globally — Four words: The world is flat.

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