Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
TweetUpdated 16th Nov 2007: Shuchi Grover pointed me to this excellent ideacast on the Harvard site [mp3] about Wikinomics. Thanks Shuchi.
Updated 30th Oct 2007 : Rajesh Kumar joins the conversation with a post on Wikinomics.
I am at our annual customer conference and had the privilege of listening to a fantastic lecture by Dan Tapscott, the best selling author of Wikinomics.
I am of the strong belief that virtual communities are going to be the key to progress in the future. As many of know i have been at the forefront of creating virtual communities within my company. Don Tapscott’s lecture was music to my ears.
He gave some superb examples of collaboration and i am listing the ones that caught my attention:
1. The brilliant example of the Gold miner corp which did the unthinkable for a mining company – posted its geo data online and requested the community to find potential gold mines. This is from Ross Dawson’s Living Networks book (which i haven’t read). Ross has written about the Goldminer example on his blog.
2. He talked about how they used the community to create Doritos ad and the winner was aired during the Superbowl – what an honor for a small time amateur ad maker! The winner was this one about the check out girl [must see video clip]. He played the one that won the contest and the one that he liked the best – the mouse trap. [This is a must-see video clip, please follow the link]
He gave several examples like Flickr Vs. Kodak Photo Gallery, Youtube Vs. MTV, Wikipedia Vs. Brittanica etc. The overall point being that Community approach always wins over the “Content is King” approach personified by the losing companies.
He talked about a 7 point framework that lays out the strategy of the Wikinomics approach. You can read more about these 7 points in the Business Week Wikinomics special series:
1.Peer Innovation and Production
2.Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds
3.Hack This Product, Please!4.The New Science of Sharing
5.Opening Up to Collaboration
6.The Global Plant Floor
7.The Wiki Workplace
Overall, the lecture has convinced me to add this book to my to-do list. If any of you have read this book already, please chime in, in the comments section.
Sukumar- Not sure how you blog real-time!
The lecture was fantastic.
One of the key insights I took away was- if you share more you win more.
I wanted to share an experience- last year my brother joined a MS Robotics program here in the US- the first semester was very tough for him. He was really stressed out with the homework he was assigned in one of the classes. He had to write a program in Robotics (I don’t know the details).
I could not bear to see my brother’s agony – he was working day and night on it- I decided to post the problem on the internet and see if anyone had any ideas for my brother- in two days three people solved it and sent the code!
My brother is very ethical – he never used it. But, I was amazed with the power of collaboration.
My brother went on to get a ‘A’ grade in the course after much struggle.
– Rani
[…]Sukumar has done a post on a lecture by Dan Tapscott […]
Thanks for stopping by Rani. Wow! your brother’s example is a great testimony to the power of collaboration. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Rajesh for joining the conversation. I have updated my post to include a link to your post.
Sukumar,
It was indeed such a great opportunity to listen to Dan Tapscott.
I think, both Central models and Collaborative models have rightful place in future.
Let us take news, while we can accept CNN iReport supplementing the controlled news, we cannot probably accept all news from iReport. It lacks predictability, guaranteed authenticity and guaranteed quality. Also self-censoring is also not always possible in the collaborative models.
Same is the case with scientific research, govt policies, rules, trading etc..we need to go with centralized models with collaborative channels supplementing the centralized channels.
Your comments please…
BTW will you be coming Tampa side?
Good post Sukumar. Really amazing how you found time to do this in the midst of your busy meeting.
For everyone within our company, the benefits of community and sharing is pretty obvious, thanks to you. I have heard this Gold miner corp example before. Very interesting.
I wish these lectures were made available for the rest of the company too.
Another interesting example of colloboration. My B-School Prof Rob Bloomfield uses the online virtual world Second Life as his classroom for a course that guides students through the complex economics arising in the metaverse of virtual worlds. He has also coined a new term “metanomics” which deals with the economics of the metaverse. Rob’s avatars name in Second Life is Beyers Sellers.
Another interesting example on collaboration. My BSchool professor Rob Bloomfield uses the online virtual world Second Life as his classroom for a course that guides students through the complex economics arising in the metaverse of virtual worlds. He has also coined a new term “metanomics” which deals with the economics of the metaverse. Rob’s avatar’s name is Second Life is Beyers Sellers
Vamsi,
Good point. I think I agree. But let us say we want to be provocative, why do we need centralized models? Can I not achieve what the centralized model achieves completely via collaboration?
Thanks Archana. I had not heard about the goldminer case before. It just blew my mind away.
Thanks Joe. I need to read up on this metanomics before I can comment. Sounds very interesting though. Thanks for sharing.
I was also reminded of this post that I did on Prof. Eric Maskin, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics. In one of his research papers he talks about patents being detrimental to innovation. In a sense it is related to your post, because it reaffirms the strength of collaboration and openness.
http://archanaraghuram.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/what-i-loved-about-nobel-prizes-this-year/
good point Archana. i am on the fence about patents and now i slowly leaning towards a anti-patents position. It appears we gain a lot more when we collaborate than when we protect our IP using patents.
Sukumar,
Just commenting on patents alone and that too from a software industry perspective, the system is broken and we should find ways to fix it, rather than eliminate it.
Patents serve the purpose of disclosure than encouraging inventions. Encouragement for new inventions comes from various other motivations. It seems like patents exist simply for the purpose of advertising your idea with no statement of intent to exercise the idea for any kind of benefit – personal or good of the society. This is what the patent trolls have taken advantage of, which in turn has led to proliferation of defensive patents.
And then there are the murky and iffy patents, where patents have been granted to the application of a well-known algorithm to a particular domain. Here is a made up example – “Applying binary search algorithm for traversing through a list of access control entities in an insurance application”
Of course, USPTO needs to staff up and improve its record on ‘obvious’ things that are patented. However, checks and balances needs to come from the judicial system. Patent trolls must be recognized and heavy punitive damages must be assessed on such trolls.
Or should employees revolt and refuse to patent the very obvious!!
Ganesh
Sukumar,
Just commenting on the patents alone and that too from a software industry perspective, the system is broken and we should find ways to fix it, rather than eliminate it.
Patents serve the purpose of disclosure than encouraging inventions. Encouragement for new inventions comes from various other motivations. It seems like patents exist simply for the purpose of advertising your idea with no statement of intent to exercise the idea for any kind of benefit – personal or good of the society. This is what the patent trolls have taken advantage of, which in turn has led to proliferation of defensive patents.
And then there are the murky and iffy patents, where patents have been granted to the application of a well-known algorithm to a particular domain. Here is a made up example – “Applying binary search algorithm for traversing through a list of access control entities in an insurance application”
Of course, USPTO needs to staff up and improve its record on ‘obvious’ things that are patented. However, checks and balances needs to come from the judicial system. Patent trolls must be recognized and heavy punitive damages must be assessed on such trolls.
Or should employees revolt and refuse to patent the very obvious!!
Ganesh
Ganesh,
As you say, the current patenting process atleast as far as software patents are concerned is clearly broken.
maybe a well-implemented patents regime is beneficial but we won’t know because of how the system is implemented.
I doubt if employees will have enough courage/incentive to revolt against such practices.
I think my view (of which i am not 100% convinced myself ) is that we are better off without patents because we may be more freely sharing intellectual property for the greater good. Having said that, my ambivalence comes when i look at the Google Pagerank algorithm that has been patented and is a genuine advance in the industry and they deserve IP protection. But maybe such cases are few and far between in the current patent regime.
Great Article Sukumar..i have always felt that one of mankinds greatest sins was the burning of the Great Lib of Alexandria ..since all those books were placed at a single location it was easy to destroy…but now thanks to Internet and we can easliy collabrate and extract information in a quick time…with out worrieng about losess….as valuable knowldge remains…..Rani’s brother’s case is classic example…
But again on the flip side it has lead to unwanted plagarism.
Thanks Karthik. Excellent point on the distribution of knowledge thereby avoiding the single point of failure like the library in Alexandria.
Yes, Rani’s brother’s example is an excellent one.
And yes, plagiarism is a problem. I am hoping that it will change with more awareness and better technology.