It is beginning to deliver dynamic new services - from free long distance video-telephony to remote brain surgery. This new Web links over a billion people directly, and (unlike Web 1.0) it now reaches out to the physical world, connecting trillions of objects from hotel doors to cars. You can plug into InnoCentive and join Procter and Gamble's virtual R&D department remix the Nine Inch Nails rock album or co-design the interactive features for your next BMW. You can build your own business on Amazon produce a television news clip for Current TV create a community around your photo collection on Flickr or edit the astronomy entry on Wikipedia. In the world of WIKINOMICS, the choices for collaboration are endless. Millions of people - consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors - now harness technology to innovate and collaborate like never before. Interconnected and orchestrated through blogs, Wikis, chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks, and personal broadcasting, the Web is being reinvented to provide the first global platform for collaboration. The knowledge, resou[rces, and computing power of billions of people are self-organizing into a massive collective force. This clear and meticulously researched primer gives business leaders big leg up on mass collaboration possibilities as such, it makes a fine next-step companion piece to James Surowiecki's 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds.'WIKINOMICS explains how winning companies innovate and succeed in the emerging Age of Collaboration. Methods for exploiting the power of collaborative production are outlined throughout, an alluring compendium of ways to throw open previously guarded intellectual property and to invite in previously unavailable ideas that hide within the populace at large. Problems arise when the authors indulge an outsized sense of scope-'this may be the birth of a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance, or the rise of Athenian democracy'-while acknowledging only reluctantly the caveats of weighty sources like Microsoft's Bill Gates.

But also considered are lesser-known success stories of global collaboration that star Procter & Gamble, BMW, Lego and a host of software and niche companies. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written, compiled, edited and re-edited by 'ordinary people' is the most ubiquitous example, and its history makes remarkable reading. The word 'wiki' means 'quick' in Hawaiian, and here author and think tank CEO Tapscott (The Naked Corporation), along with research director Williams, paint in vibrant colors the quickly changing world of Internet togetherness, also known as mass or global collaboration, and what those changes mean for business and technology.

Wikinomics book