Book Review: Wikinomics – How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

No book has had more of an impact on this blog than Wikinomics, so here’s the final verdict up front:  Read this book!

The 2008 expanded edtion of the book’s got 11 chapters, and each of them hits a major concept that Tapscott and Williams want to either define or elaborate on.  Here are a few of the more exciting ones along with blurbs on how they can help you.

Ideagoras: Marketplaces for ideas

What does this mean to you?  It means that consumer products giant Procter & Gamble has gone from doing nearly all of their own R&D internally to sourcing 50% of their ideas from external agents.  “Idea marketplaces” like InnoCentive provide a way for agents to buy and sell ideas.  This gives retired scientists a way to make money in their spare time by using their decades of expertise.  This makes P&G more agile by not having to try to employ each of these researchers full time.

You could be doing this! Research doesn’t need to be done in house anymore, and it can’t be if you expect to keep ahead of your competitors in the current cash-strapped environment.

Prosumers: Consumers who are also producers

As our products and services increasingly move online our sales and marketing plans are regularly undone by customers.  Pushing messages isn’t working anymore, and that’s why we’re going to engage our customers directly and let them participate in the design and testing of our products.  You’ll save money, the products will be fleshed out quicker, and the market won’t reject them outright given their implicit ownership in the end result.

The Global Plant Floor

Take a rapid stroll through the evolution of the Chinese motorcycle industry.  Small shops collaborate up and down their supply chain to clone Japanese motorcycles and create cheaper alternatives that are “good enough” for the majority of their customers.  The willingness of these small shops to work together on sourcing and engineering allows them to go from zero to a full-blown motorcycle industry in no time at all.

Enterprise 2.0

This chapter attacks the enterprise from all sides with the Wikipedia mantras of openness and collaboration as competitive edge.  You can’t out-research a global market, so you have to work with it.  Engage prosumers to improve your design capabilities and your time to market.  Link together your internal and external stakeholders for rapid sharing of ideas and plans.

That last chapter didn’t really touch me in the same manner as the others.  To the book’s credit, the E2.0 part seems blindingly obvious after digesting the chapters that come before.  Once you buy into the core Wikinomics principles then E2.0 is just a given.  In light of that, I want you to go read this article instead: Ten Reasons why Enterprise RSS Has Failed To Become Mainstream.  It’s a great read, it makes sense of many of the difficulties I’ve had promoting SharePoint in the office, and it’s got comments from some good people.

Summary

Buy Wikinomics.  Read it, share it, write about it.  It just might change the way you think about doing business.  If you want to make it through this recession, you’ll want to figure out how to outmaneuver the rest of the market despite cutting costs.  The secret isn’t just in cutting costs and executing our plans better.  The secret is in finding disruptive technologies and processes that allow us to escape currently failing business practices altogether.  Wikinomics will help.

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