Wikinomics

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Wikinomics
Wikinomics front cover.png
Front cover of Wikinomics
Author Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Subject Business networking
PublisherPortfolio
Publication date
December 2006
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages324 p.
ISBN 1-59184-138-0
OCLC 318389282
658/.046 22
LC Class HD69.S8 T37 2006

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, first published in December 2006. It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and open-source technology, such as wikis, to be successful.

Contents

The term 'Wikinomics' describes the effects of extensive collaboration and user-participation and how relationships between businesses and markets have changed as a result.

Concepts

According to Tapscott, the use of mass collaboration in a business environment in recent history can be seen as an extension of the trend in business to outsource: externalize formerly internal business functions to other business entities. The difference however is that instead of an organized business body brought into being specifically for a unique function, mass collaboration relies on free individual agents to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem. This kind of outsourcing is also referred to as crowdsourcing, to reflect this difference. This can be incentivized by a reward system, though it is not required.

The book also discusses seven new models of mass collaboration, including:

The last chapter is written by viewers, and was opened for editing on February 5, 2007.

Central Concepts of Wikinomics in the Enterprise

According to Tapscott and Williams, these four principles are the central concepts of wikinomics in the enterprise:

  1. Openness, which includes not only open standards and content but also financial transparency and an open attitude towards external ideas and resources;
  2. Peering, which replaces hierarchical models with a more collaborative forum. Tapscott and Williams cite the development of Linux as the "quintessential example of peering";
  3. Sharing, which is a less proprietary approach to (among other things) products, intellectual property, bandwidth, scientific knowledge;
  4. Acting globally, which involves embracing globalization and ignoring "physical and geographical boundaries" at both the corporate and individual level.

Coase's Law

In the chapter The Perfect Storm, the authors give an overview of the economic effects of the kind of transactions Web 2.0 permits. According to the authors, Coase's Law (see Ronald Coase) governs the expansion of a business:

A firm will tend to expand until the cost of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction on the open market. [4]

However, because of the changing usage patterns of Internet technologies, the cost of transactions has dropped so significantly that the authors assert that the market is better described by an inversion of Coase's Law. That is:

A firm will tend to expand until the cost of carrying out an extra transaction on the open market become equal to the costs of organizing the same transaction within the firm. [4]

Thus, the authors think that with the costs of communicating dramatically dropping, firms who do not change their current structures will perish. Companies who utilize mass collaboration will dominate their respective markets.

Reception

A review of this book in the Harvard Business Review states "like its title, the book's prose can fall into breathless hype." [5] A review of this book in Choice recommends the book for "general readers and practitioners," but cautions that the authors "present an optimistic overview of successful collaborations and business ventures", "use unique terms (e.g., marketocracy, prosumption, knowledge commons)", should have given "more consideration [to] the darker sides of human motivation as well as groupthink and mass mediocrity", and "primarily draw on their own observations of businesses and trends for the ideas presented". [6]

Tapscott and Williams released a followup to Wikinomics, titled Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, on September 28, 2010. [7] [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Coase</span> British economist and Nobel laureate (1910–2013)

Ronald Harry Coase was a British economist and author. Coase received a bachelor of commerce degree (1932) and a PhD from 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."

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yochai Benkler</span> Israeli-American technology law expert, political economist, and author

Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In academia he is best known for coining the term commons-based peer production and his widely cited 2006 book The Wealth of Networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Tapscott</span>

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. He is the former Chancellor of his alma mater Trent University, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD Business School.

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.

Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.

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. For over 19 years, they have tracked, analyzed, and evaluated their virtual trading activity and have accumulated a massive database; following over 10,000 stock positions at any one time and more than four million trades.

<i>We Are Smarter Than Me</i> Book by Barry Libert

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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Produsage</span>

Produsage is a portmanteau of the words production and usage, coined by Australian media scholar Axel Bruns and popularized in his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Produsage is the type of user-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments, open source software, and the blogosphere. The concept blurs the boundaries between passive consumption and active production. The distinction between producers and consumers or users of content has faded, as users play the role of producers whether they are aware of this role or not. The hybrid term produser refers to an individual who is engaged in the activity of produsage. This concept is similar and related to commons-based peer production, a term coined by Yochai Benkler.

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.

References

  1. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, 24.
  2. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, 97.
  3. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, 124.
  4. 1 2 Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, 56
  5. Harvard Business Review, March 2007 v85 i3 p34(1)
  6. Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, August 2007 v44 i12 p2147
  7. "Books".
  8. "Home". macrowikinomics.com.
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