Wikinomics

How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

By: Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration in a meeting room, on a conference call, and even in a convention center has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.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 burgeoning 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 21st century.

Based on a $9-million research project led by best-selling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing genomes, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and 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 21st century.

©2006 Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.

Critic reviews

"A clear and exciting preview of how peer innovation will change everything." (Booklist)
"This clear and meticulously researched primer gives business leaders big leg up on mass collaboration possibilities." (Publishers Weekly)

This book is now outdated

I purchased this book, as well as Crowdsourcing, the latter of which is the much of the same subject matter, but from 2008, instead of 2007.

The narrator of Crowdsourcing is also much better, with the Wikinomics narrator sounding like he had to take smoke break every 10 minutes, having the raspy voice of a 60 year old chain smoker. Not exactly the sound of a young technology writer. His emphasis when reading is also so measured, it sounds like he's narrating a 1960s PBS documentary. He has no relationship to the material: he actually almost breaks into laughter as he says "Web 2.0".

Buy Crowdsourcing instead.

Open Mind for OpenSource

This book is a must-read for any small business or entrepreneur. There are so many concepts and ideas introduced that you'll need to carry a small notebook with you to jot down all the details.

I consider myself quite technologically savvy, but the ideas introduced in this book introduced me to miriades of new ways to expand and improve my business.

I have always been a Windows and Office kind of guy, not to spite the open-source movement, but because I never considered myself nerdy enough to be a real tech-geek. Since reading this book, however, I have explored and embraced many of the open source movements, particularly those of Wikis, and my customers and business have responded overwhelmingly favorable.

Given that this is the first book review I have ever written, I hope it will entice people to read and learn from what these authors have to offer.

Editor please

This book contains some interesting concepts to which I was happy to be introduced and some great stories, mostly from the worlds of business and academia, that illustrate and flesh out the concepts. It is also, unfortunately, tedious and repetitive. A good editor could shorten it by half and vastly improve it by doing so.

Needs a different narrator

I found the content to be useful and interesting, but was continually distracted by the voice of the narrator, Alan Sklar, who should smoke less. I felt like I was listening to an eight-hour movie trailer voiceover and it was difficult to focus on the content.

Wikinomics

Good.

Couldn't agree more...

... with most of the reviews. Rich in metaphors, but poor in examples... I expected much more of it...

unenjoyable and dusty

maybe it's already too old of a news by now, but I found this an unenjoyable book, telling me lots of stuff I already know (and I don;t come from this industry).
don't waist your time on it...

Boring

In the future, people (mainly youngsters) and forward-looking corporations will collaborate and accomplish amazing things. There, I just saved you 13 hours of listening to this book. Talk about having one idea and beating it to death over and over and over. Also, the narrator uses the same inflection for every single sentence he reads making it just that much more painful to listen to. My advice: skip this book.

Wikinonsense

It explores how some companies in the early 21st century used mass collaboration (or peer production) and open-source technology such as wikis to be successful. According to Tapscott wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The use of mass collaboration in a business environment, in recent history, can be seen as an extension of the trend in business to outsource: externalize formerly internal business functions to other business entities. The difference however is that instead of an organized business body brought into being specifically for a unique function, mass collaboration relies on free individual agents to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem. This kind of outsourcing is also referred as crowdsourcing, to reflect this difference. This can be incentivized by a reward system, though it is not required.

While, there are some interesting examples and some valuable insights, the book is far from being a critical study. Even when it is insightful, it is like listening to people smoking pot. Every idea is clever as long as nobody is sober.

The section on Sharing is toothless in examining the implications of the loss of property rights. Real companies should be real careful about drinking this exuberant koolaid. But don't take any of it too seriously - if the authors believed what they were saying, then why didn't they just blog the book for free and make money from "incentives"?

In fact, here is a Godelian puzzle to ponder:
The last chapter will be written by viewers, and was opened for editing on February 5, 2007. So, if the authors truly believed what they are saying in the first chapters that are not open for editing, then why wouldn't they let the wisdom of the crowd edit the first part as well?

If you are going to read this, then please also read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

By the way, the first paragraph of my review was lifted from wikipedia.

Not as good as expected

I heard the author speak at a conference recently and he was/is a super speaker, but this book.....

I am half way through the book now and am finding it a bit slow and heavy on words and opinions but light on examples and cases. There's certainly some good stuff in the material, I was just expecting more.