Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
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Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Alan Sklar (Narrator), Don Tapscott (Author), Anthony D. Williams (Author),
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 201 ratings
Editors' pick Best Nonfiction
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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few years, traditional collaboration in a meeting room, on a conference call, and even in a convention center has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.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.
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  1. Listening Length
    13 hours and 39 minutes
  2. Author
    Don Tapscott, see all
  3. Narrator
    Alan Sklar
  4. Audible release date
    April 6, 2007
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Tantor Audio
  7. ASIN
    B000P7V7E6
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 13 hours and 39 minutes
Author Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
Narrator Alan Sklar
Audible.com Release Date April 06, 2007
Publisher Tantor Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B000P7V7E6
Best Sellers Rank #335,363 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#444 in Business Infrastructure
#515 in Programming & Software Development
#667 in Knowledge Capital (Books)

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
201 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Sahra Badou
5.0 out of 5 stars Business in the 21st century
Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2007
Verified Purchase
In this book, the authors argue that the internet will change businesses for the better. Unlike in the recent book I read, "The Cult of the Amateur", by Andrew Keen (see my review), that argues the negative impact of the internet, Tapscott and Williams praise the internet as a medium to faster progress through sharing and contribution. Similarly, Al Gore in "The Assault on Reason" praises the internet and argues against any laws imposing restrictions on it.

Just a few years ago, companies met in boardrooms to take crucial decisions on their future and to solve short and long-term problems. Nowadays, the boardroom is the internet, with thousands if not millions of people sharing and contributing their expertise and know-how. Companies no longer have to solely rely on their employees to solve problems. Posting their problems on the internet will get them a multitude of possible solutions. Smart firms harness this collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

Encyclopedias, like Wikipedia; jetliners, like Boeing; operating systems, like Linux; mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. And most of these people contribute their know-how for free!

Many examples abound of companies who have benefited from the online community. Goldcorp used an online competition to find the location of gold in North Canada. They used open source tactics, and revealed their research and statistics online. Savvy online engineers were able to use that information to pinpoint with precise accuracy where gold could be found. It is not easy for a company to make public its proprietary research, but by doing so, they stand to benefit from the expertise of thousands of people.

Wikipedia is a good example of mass contribution. The online encyclopedia has now, according to some experts, surpassed the Encyclopedia Britannica. Anyone can contribute and correct information on Wikipedia. I recently read the really great book "Charlie Wilson's War" by George Crile. I wanted to find more information on Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, but there were no entries of him on my 2007 Encyclopedia Britannica DVD. However, on Wikipedia I found a lot of information on him, and even that a movie is being made about him. All contributors, who are people like you and me, contribute to Wikipedia for free. Whoever said that the Universe does not give a free lunch?

Amazon is another great example of peer contribution. Just surf to amazon.com (like you've just done now) and read reviews submitted by millions of people on any item, whether books, electronics, foods, software, jewelry etc. You'll be able to make a better decision on whether to buy an item. These reviews are submitted to Amazon by people like you and I for free. Amazon benefits from these reviews for most people end up buying the items reviewed from Amazon.

Amazon has also opened their API to the public, allowing programmers worldwide to tinker with their code. Many people have opened online stores as a result of Amazon's open source APIs. These stores get prices and details on all products listed on Amazon. As a result, anyone can now open an online store, get information on millions of products direct from Amazon, and sell any of these products. Amazon takes care of all financial transactions for you. All you have to do is ship the products to the buyers. Who would have thought just a few years ago business could be made so easy? All of this is of course possible because of the internet.

Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other online social networking communities also pioneered a new form of collaborative production. In Second Life, for example, you may have a virtual life similar to your day to day real life. In Second Life, you may own a house, go shopping, go to clubs and meet new people, and even invest in real estate using Linden currency. I read once in Businessweek that a British woman made over a million dollars investing in real estate in Second Life. Linden money can be converted into real currency!

The bottom line of this book is that sharing your company's inner workings with the online community is good for the health and progress of your company. The contribution by the online community to your company is what's going to keep it competitive in this fast moving technologically oriented society. The internet has now made it possible to harness the brain power of millions of people worldwide.

According to the authors, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century. After all, the book is based on a $9 million research project.

I highly recommend the book. It will change the way you do business from now on. Indeed, there is power in numbers!
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Anthony Wong
5.0 out of 5 stars Bechmarking Example with Defining Ideas
Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2009
Verified Purchase
This is a book that contains defining ideas with lots of benching examples. The illustration is wonderful and very inspirating. Each chapter starts off with a real benchmarking example followed by a desciption of phenonmenon of how different people "working together". Then, a defined idea summerizes the previous description in the chapter. After that, some rebuts and various opinions from different view points are provided to readers. At last, a vision for the future is form to guide reader to develope the future of mass collaboration.

It is a nice book for manager, business owner, educator, sciencist, medical professionals and people working on community and charity services. Also, it teaches some leadership initiative to form a success "mass collaboration organisation".

The only short-coming is that the author did not teach reader how to develop a web site for social community and online society.

Written by Anthony Wong.
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John W. Pearson
4.0 out of 5 stars The Mass Collaboration Gold Mine
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2007
Verified Purchase
This book hammers home a 21st century no-brainer. "It's all based on a principle the new generation of Web start-ups learned from the open source software community: There are always more smart people outside your enterprise boundaries than there are inside."

While it has mixed reviews ("made me feel alternately like Christopher Columbus and Grandpa Simpson"), it's an important addition to your organization's resource library.

Tapscot and Williams deliver fascinating case studies of companies that have opened up their internal secrets/data to the world so "mass collaboration" can help them solve big problems. Procter & Gamble did it and so did a failing Toronto-based gold-mining firm. In 2000, Goldcorp, Inc. ran a contest, the "Goldcorp Challenge," with $575,000 in prize money--and posted all of the mine's proprietary data on the web. The request: help us find more gold. The result: "More than 1,000 virtual prospectors from 50 countries got busy crunching the data."

Mass collaboration from the most unlikely sources and disciplines targeted new mother lodes on their 55,000-acre property. It worked: $100 invested in the company in 1993 was worth more than $3,000 in 2006.

There's a core value here (a biblical one) for faith-based organizations and churches: it's all kingdom work. It's time to open up and work together versus holding your ministry close to the vest. (It's not your ministry anyway!)

Read this book and then ask your team these questions: 1) What's our biggest challenge in the next 12 months? 2) Would mass collaboration help us solve it? 3) Do we operate as if the smartest people are INSIDE our organization or OUTSIDE our organization? Why?
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Top reviews from other countries

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Christian Nugue
3.0 out of 5 stars A shared revolution
Reviewed in France on September 27, 2016
Verified Purchase
A revolution usually pitches one segment of the population against another one. But the new scenario presented here convincingly sells the idea of a transparent and collaborative model relying on the knowledge and talent of the whole population. We are all given an opportunity to shape a new world. What we have here is a pretty accurate and enticing account of how the technological trend is translating into a new economic model. Share your thoughts, your questions and even your most sensitive corporate data and you will be rewarded.
The book explains in simple terms how "crowdsourcing" creates new ideas, new products and new wealth. Its enthusiasm is sometimes contagious.
But when you look under the hood, you might detect some serious flaws Who benefits most from this revolution ? The capitalistic companies that see their market value soar. Collaboration often means insecurity and meager earnings for the collaborators. The author omits to mention that crowdsourcing is a double-edged sword.
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Penny McEwen
5.0 out of 5 stars complicated subject made easier to grasp
Reviewed in Canada on December 29, 2015
Verified Purchase
helps a bit.. . .
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Andrea L.
4.0 out of 5 stars un must
Reviewed in Italy on April 19, 2014
Verified Purchase
Grande libro, che spiega dalla base i fondamenti della wikinomics, il sistema economico che sta cambiando il mondo. Da leggere
One person found this helpful
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Lo Gran
4.0 out of 5 stars Great elightening and disturbin essay
Reviewed in Spain on June 4, 2013
Verified Purchase
This is a great essay. It is particularly enlightening for those who come from the paper analogical era because it explains a world with different rules, somewhat of science fiction. This is why it is also disturbing, because this science fiction is not so, on the contrary it is reality. Though since the book was published things kept evolving and some new patterns should be taken into account, this essay is a must to anybody who wants to understand what business is about in the digital era.
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Gerhard Fehr
4.0 out of 5 stars Business Web 2.0 - Kooperation führt zu Erfolg
Reviewed in Germany on October 10, 2007
Verified Purchase
Das Buch gibt einen guten Ueberglick über die derzeitigen Business Cases im web, auf sehr sachliche und interessante Weise. Gleichzeitig kann man lernen, dass sich grosse Firmen (als Beispiel IBM) bereits in den späten 90-iger Jahren entschlossen haben, ihre Software und Serverentwicklung teilweise in die Linux/Apache-Welt auszugliedern, und so nicht nur einen grossen Beitrag an diese "community" zu machen, aber auch sehr mit dieser neuen Ausrichtung zu profitieren.

Das Buch beschreibt die verschieden Möglichkeiten der Kooperation im web ohne zu vergessen, dass "proprietäre" Systeme im traditionellen Sinne nicht überholt sind, aber nicht mehr für alle Unternehmensgebiete sinnvoll. Wie vor 20 Jahren das "Outsourcing" dazu geführt hat, dass Unternehmensbereiche ausgegliedert wurde, führt auch diese Entwicklung zu einer Konzentration auf das "Wesentliche" und einem "outsourcing" von Leistungen,welche man mit Dritten teilen möchte.

Das Buch ist leicht lesbar und ist m.E. für Leser angedacht, die an den wirtschaftlichen Zusammenhängen des "Mitmachwebs" interessiert sind.
5 people found this helpful
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