Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is set to hit the shelves in just over a month from now. Don Tapscott and I have had a lot of good book-related news recently, including freshly-inked deals to translate Wikinomics into Japanese and Spanish. Now we’ve decided to make the introduction and chapter one available to potential readers who’d like a preview of what the book has to offer. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Due to deep changes in technology, demographics, business, the economy, and the world, we are entering 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 change presents far-reaching opportunities for every company and for every person who gets connected.
In the past, collaboration was mostly small-scale. It was something that took place among relatives, friends, and associates in households, communities, and workplaces. In relatively rare instances, collaboration approached mass-scale, but this was mainly in short bursts of political action. Think of the Vietnam-era war protests or, more recently, about the raucous anti-globalization rallies in Seattle, Turin, and Washington.
Never before, however, have individuals had the power or opportunity to link up in loose networks of peers to produce goods and services in a very tangible and ongoing way. Most people were confined to relatively limited economic roles, whether as passive consumers of mass-produced products or employees trapped deep within organizational bureaucracies where the boss told them what to do. Even their elected representatives barely concealed their contempt for bottom-up participation in decision-making. In all, too many people were bypassed in the circulation of knowledge, power, and capital, and thus participated at the economy’s margins.
Today the tables are turning. The growing accessibility of information technologies puts the tools required to collaborate, create value, and compete at everybody’s fingertips. This liberates people to participate in innovation and wealth creation within every sector of the economy. Millions of people already join forces in self-organized collaborations that produce dynamic new goods and services that rival those of the world’s largest and best-financed enterprises. This new mode of innovation and value creation is called “peer production,†or peering—which describes what happens when masses of people and firms collaborate openly to drive innovation and growth in their industries.
Some examples of peer production have recently become household names. As of August 2006, the online networking extravaganza MySpace had 100 million users whose personal musings, connections, and profiles are the primary engines of value creation on the site. MySpace, YouTube, Linux, and Wikipedia—today’s pinnacles of mass collaboration—are just the beginning; a few familiar characters in the opening pages of the first chapter in a long-running saga that will change everything about how the economy operates. In the forthcoming pages of this book we describe seven unique forms of peer production that are making the economy more dynamic and productive. Along the way we offer engaging stories for the casual reader and great insights for the businessperson seeking to harness this new force in their business.
If you like what you read you can pre-order your copy from Amazon, Chapters (in Canada), Barnes & Noble, and a number of other online book retailers. Please also make a note to visit wikinomics.com next month where Don and I are launching a suite of interactive community-building features, including a wiki of the last chapter. We’ll be among the first to test-run PikSpot: a new social software offering that will also power Leo Laporte’s and Chris Pirillo’s new venture called UndoTV (more on this later).
Get your copy the introduction and chapter one of Wikinomics here and share it with your friends.
Comments
[...] Last month, I blogged about my general impressions of the Web 2.0 summit conference, and noted that one of the speakers (Don Tapscott) had a forthcoming book entitled Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything. Actually, it turns out that he co-authored the book with one of his colleagues, Anthony D. Williams (whose blog is here). In any case, the book has now come forth, and Amazon delivered it to my door yesterday. I’ve read through the Introduction and first chapter, both of which are available for free download here — and since it could take several weeks (e.g., on subway rides, plane trips when I’m stuck in a middle seat and can’t use my laptop computer) before I finish the remaining chapters, I thought I would post my initial comments now. [...]