How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

By Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

In the first book to truly come to grips with some of the most profound business changes of our time, WIKINOMICS explains how winning companies innovate and succeed in the emerging age of mass collaboration.

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.

Millions of media buffs now use blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and personal broadcasting to add their voices to a swirling stream of dialogue and debate called the blogosphere. Employees drive performance by collaborating with peers across organizational boundaries, creating what we call a wiki workplace. Customers become prosumers by co-creating goods and services rather than simply consuming the end product. Supply chains work more effectively when the risk, reward, and capability to complete major projects — including complex physical products like cars, motorcycles, and airplanes — are distributed across a planetary network of partners.

These changes, among others, are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history — a world where value creation will be fast, fluid and persistently disruptive; a world where only the connected will survive. A power shift is underway and a tough new business rule is emerging: harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated, cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value.

With vivid and engaging examples, WIKINOMICS explains how smart firms are harnessing mass collaboration in powerful new ways to drive innovation and success. The new mass collaboration presents far-reaching opportunities for every company and, most of all, for you.