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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.

For the uninitiated, a “wiki” is software that allows anyone with access to a computer to create, edit, and link webpages. It has also been called the “open content” movement in which users of the web generate content. The prime example of this is Wikipedia, an ever-growing body of information that receives about 7 billion hits a month. User-generated content has been the modus operandi of many successful and innovative sites such as Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, and YouTube, to name a few. The authors maintain that this phenomenon is going even further: not only is it changing the way traditional companies do business, it is transforming the economy.

Economist Ronald Coase stated in 1937 that companies exist to lower transaction costs. In a wiki-economy, the authors claim, this is no longer the case. They give the example of Goldcorp, a mining company. Goldcorp was a failing company with revenues of about $100 million. They needed new places to drill but found the cost prohibitive. They decided to post a website with their proprietary data in order allow anyone and everyone to locate drilling sites. A prize would be awarded to the lucky ones. The response was enormous and Goldcorp prospered. Their revenues reached $9 billion as a result. Transaction costs can be lowered by opening up the company to mass collaboration.

Government agencies are also taking up mass collaboration. After 9/11, intelligence agencies were faulted for not sharing and corroborating their information. Since then they have created a shared online community known as IntelliPedia, modelled on Wikipedia. This new and apparently successful site, however, is only open to members of the intelligence community. Mass collaboration within government agencies is a very important step in the effectiveness of governance.

The authors tell us that this change is driven by a new generation of computer users who are more active and skilled at creating content. They call this group “prosumers” since they have a proactive relationship with the products they buy. One will notice ads on the Internet by companies such as Pepsi and Frito-Lay soliciting consumers to design the next generation of packaging.

The transition to Wikinomics will not be without its disruptions. (Read also Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Unabridged) and Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.) Many professionals are being displaced by hobbyists and amateurs. Wether or not this is a good thing will depend on which side of the equation one is on.

The authors’ encountered their own difficulties when they tried to enter the term wikinomics on Wikipedia. The phantom editors determined that the word was not yet widespread enough to merit an entry - meaning it only made a limited appearance when it was googled. Apparently the word wikinomics is not catching on as the authors had hoped.

While the title of the book focuses on “Mass Collaboration,” the contents provide a solid basis - justification & approach - for knowledge management. There is no longer justification for being shy about the KM. All the tools are here - although still somewhat disparate and not fully integrated - to create a practical knowledge system that captures the explicit as well as the tacit intellectual assets of an organization and make it easily available to other users when and where they need the knowledge. The book gives case after case of how successful companies such as DuPont leverage the power of Wiki to create a collaborative environment for solving complex problems in a highly competitive and dynamic marketplace. At a time when the scarcest resource is knowledgable people, particularly in the maufacturing sector, Wikis provide one of the basic elements of a knowledge system that help deal with this issue. Soon, companies will recognize knowledge management as an effective means for dealing with the resource crisis issue; that is in addition to (and as a preferable altrernative to) outsourcing, off-shoring and overloading of employees.

We have seen Infonomics and now there is Wikinomics.
First of all: I like the book it contains interesting information on the subject matter.
However, it is too enthusiastic and optimistic and not objective and realistic.
It is true that many things on the web operate under the keywords Open, Sharing and Peering. But it is also true that one of the most innovative companies - Google - is closed as a clamshell about future plans and current developments, where Microsoft at least provides us with some road maps. Google throws out services as Beta to see if we like it. And it adds open API’s to let customers increase the value. This is not wikinomics, but clever marketing.

I’ve bought and read the book on Wikinomics. Sure, this is a nice read with a lot of insights. If you’re a regular internet user I think there is not so much new stuff in it, but alas.

My point is more of a principal nature. The authors plead for more openness and innovation will be the reward. Why then is the book itself not free or made for a modest cost-price or integrally downloadable (like manuals can be bought on paper for Linux distribution Ubuntu and these even can be downloaded for free). The reasoning would be that the authors would become more famous and are invited at more prestigous seminars with higher fees and can command higher fees for their consultancy hours.

Maybe this point is made before by others, but I tried to search on the website related to the book but did not find anything like it. And also, there is no forum about the book itself on the website of the authors. Why not let readers discuss about the contents on this site, apart from the wiki put there to write another book collaboratively (which is by itself as I see not the succesful yet).

Make analyses why this wiki is not working and others are. Try to learn something out of it, make it open, walk your talk!

The new reality of mass collaboration on free products disrupts many business models, our own among them. If you are feeling any pain from the wikiverse, or you want to cause some wikiruption of your own, read this book!

Wikinomics is a gem. The authors thoroughly explores the topic, and give a myriad of examples from current businesses and companies to make their points. They have caused me to rethink what I though I knew, and have provided many ideas for further contemplation. Bravo.