Ronald Harry Coase was a British economist and author. Coase was educated at the London School of Economics, where he was a member of the faculty until 1951. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.
"The Nature of the Firm" (1937) is an article by Ronald Coase. It offered an economic explanation of why individuals choose to form partnerships, companies, and other business entities rather than trading bilaterally through contracts on a market. The author was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991 in part due to this paper. Despite the honor, the paper was written when Coase was an undergraduate and he described it later in life as "little more than an undergraduate essay."
In economics and related disciplines, a transaction cost is a cost in making any economic trade when participating in a market. The idea that transactions form the basis of economic thinking was introduced by the institutional economist John R. Commons in 1931, and Oliver E. Williamson's Transaction Cost Economics article, published in 2008, popularized the concept of transaction costs. Douglass C. North argues that institutions, understood as the set of rules in a society, are key in the determination of transaction costs. In this sense, institutions that facilitate low transaction costs, boost economic growth.
A prosumer is an individual who both consumes and produces. The term is a portmanteau of the words producer and consumer. Research has identified six types of prosumers: DIY prosumers, self-service prosumers, customizing prosumers, collaborative prosumers, monetised prosumers, and economic prosumers.
Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-based projects generally have less rigid hierarchical structures than those under more traditional business models.
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism.
Don Tapscott is a Canadian business executive, author, consultant and speaker, who specializes in business strategy, organizational transformation and the role of technology in business and society. He is the CEO of the Tapscott Group and the co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute.
Peer production is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the labor of many people is coordinated towards a shared outcome.
Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature. Such projects typically take place on the internet using social software and computer-supported collaboration tools such as wiki technologies, which provide a potentially infinite hypertextual substrate within which the collaboration may be situated. Open source software such as Linux was developed via mass collaboration.
Marketocracy Capital Management, is the investment advisor for the Marketocracy family of mutual funds and uses the research generated by Marketocracy Data Services. Marketocracy has recruited over 70,000 people to manage over 100,000 model portfolios at marketocracy.com that compete to become the best investors.
We Are Smarter Than Me is a collaborative-writing project using wiki software, whose initial goal was producing a book about decision making processes that use large numbers of people. The first book was published as a printed book, late in 2007, by the publishing conglomerate Pearson Education. Along with Pearson, the project's four core sponsors include research institutes of the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
A knowledge market is a mechanism for distributing knowledge resources. There are two views on knowledge and how knowledge markets can function. One view uses a legal construct of intellectual property to make knowledge a typical scarce resource, so the traditional commodity market mechanism can be applied directly to distribute it. An alternative model is based on treating knowledge as a public good and hence encouraging free sharing of knowledge. This is often referred to as attention economy. Currently there is no consensus among researchers on relative merits of these two approaches.
Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which private individuals do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media.
A service network is a structure that brings together several entities to deliver a particular service. For instance, one organisation may sub-contract another organisation to deliver after-sales services to a third party. The buyer may use more than one supplier. Likewise, the supplier may participate in other networks. The rationale for a service network is that each organisation is focusing on what they do best.
Collaborative leadership is a management practice which is focused on leadership skills across functional and organizational boundaries.
Before being open, innovation happened in closed environments often performed by individuals, scientists or employees. However, the expression closed innovation was coined later and not before the paradigm of open innovation became popular by works of Henry Chesbrough and Don Tapscott et Anthony D. Williams
Collaborative finance is a category of financial transaction that occurs directly between individuals without the intermediation of a traditional financial institution. This new way to manage informal financial transactions has been enabled by advances in social media and peer-to-peer online platforms. The wide variety of collaborative finance resources may vary not only in their organizational and operational aspects, but also by geographical region, share of the financial market etc. It is precisely this heterogeneity that enables the informal savings and credit activity to profitably reach those income-groups not served by commercial banks and other financial institutions. It is their informality, adaptability and flexibility of operations – characteristics which reduce their transactions costs and confers upon them their comparative advantage and economic rationale. Collaborative Finance is characterized by highly personalized loan transactions entailing face-to-face dealings with borrowers and flexibility in respect of loan purpose, interest rates, collateral requirements, maturity periods and debt rescheduling.
A community is "a body of people or things viewed collectively". According to [[Steven Brintgregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who are bound together principally by relations of affect, loyalty, common values, and/or personal concern – i.e., interest in the personalities and life events of one another".
Digital collaboration is using digital technologies for collaboration. Dramatically different from traditional collaboration, it connects a broader network of participants who can accomplish much more than they would on their own. Digital Collaboration is used in many fields, for example digital collaboration in classrooms.
