Wikinomics – How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

In the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superseded by electronic collaborations on an astronomical scale. 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 fast growth of these massive online communities or fail to understand the power of mass collaboration, those entrepreneurs and managers that leverage the power of the internet for information sharing and innovation are reaping huge benefits. Wikinomics explains how to prosper in a world where new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. Anyone who wants to understand the major forces revolutionizing business today should read and embrace the principled in Wikinomics.

Some the great case studies and examples in Wikinomics:

How Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has created a phenomenon in the world of knowledge sharing.

How Boeing design and build plans using a global network of outsourced partners

How Amazon open up their website backend code to developers all over the world so that they can experiment to develop new innovative tools for Amazon. When such tools are developed and applied, both parties benefit. Amazon by having the most innovative retail website and the developer by earning revenue off transactions resulting from the tool he or she developed.

How clever innovators are mashing together different web applications to create value – e.g. mash together Google maps and a hotel review website so that you can see the different classes of hotel in a city on a Google Map

How the opensource software development movement continues to thrive and produce great products. How IBM supports this movement vigorously for the value that they get from it.

There are many more great examples in this rich, well researched book. It will get all business leaders thinking how these principles can be applied in their industry.

P.S. The book inspired me to run an entire MBA course via a wiki – cutting out all paper and hardcopy files and facilitating sharing between students. See gibs-mba-entrepreneurship.pbwiki.com