Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

This entry duplicates the preceding Wikinomics record in the reference; both refer to the 2006 book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams, whose full subtitle is How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The content assessment is the same.

The book argues that cheap coordination allows firms to draw on large numbers of contributors outside their own boundaries, and that companies organised for open collaboration will outperform closed ones. It is built around four principles the authors call openness, peering, sharing and acting globally, and around a set of cases: Goldcorp releasing its geological data as a public competition, InnoCentive matching corporate research problems to outside solvers, Linux and Wikipedia as peer production, Procter and Gamble's external innovation sourcing, and Boeing's distributed design of the 787.

The underlying economics is Coase's theory of the firm applied to falling transaction costs, with the conclusion that firm boundaries should contract and external collaboration expand.

The treatment is promotional and selects on success. The Boeing example turned out badly, with the distributed supply chain producing severe delays and cost overruns. The prediction that peer production would broadly displace firm production has not been borne out. The actual development of the following decade, in which a few platform companies captured most of the value created by distributed user contribution, is not anticipated in the analysis.

Canadian business author and consultant, co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, who wrote The Digital Economy and Wikinomics.

The Digital Economy set out early how networks would redraw firm boundaries, and Wikinomics documented mass collaboration - open source, peer production, crowdsourced research - as a working production model rather than a curiosity. Blockchain Revolution extends the argument to distributed ledgers and their business applications.

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