After many years of investigating the emerging world of amateur creativity, grassroots media, and technology-enabled innovation in the public and private sectors, I’m finally eating my own dog food and getting a weblog up and running.
Most of my posts over the coming months will no doubt revolve around material from my new book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (co-authored with Don Tapscott), which is due to be published by Portfolio in December 2006. Don and I spent the last year immersed in researching and writing this book and, like most authors, we had more stories, anecdotes, and arguments than we could possibly cram into one book. So naturally, this blog is a great outlet for all this material, which in turn should give interested readers a taste of what the book itself has to offer.
Wikinomics explains how deep changes in the nature of technology, demographics and the global economy are giving rise to a new age where people participate in the economy like never before. This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis.
This idea is not entirely new of course. It’s been an ongoing topic of investgation for my colleagues and I at New Paradigm and its predecessor Digital 4Sight since the mid-1990s. Several other leading thinkers such as Kevin Kelly and Yochai Benkler (to name a few) have also touched on these themes recently and, in Benkler’s case, written at great length on how peer production is changing the economy and creating new possibilities for social justice.
Missing from all this pathbreaking work is a clear and compelling analysis of how business leaders can harness mass collaboration to drive innovation and growth in their businesses. And that is where we feel Wikinomics — the new art and science of mass collaboration — adds to the conversation about how enterprises create value and compete in a world where knowledge and capability is more dispersed than in any previous era.
Beyond business, I’ll be writing about how wikinomics impacts science, government, democracy, everyday life, and a number of other themes that we touched on in the book, but didn’t cover in as much depth as I would have liked. I hope you visit regularly and by all means please join in the conversation!
