Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Peering helps assign the right person to the right task more effectively than traditional firms. The reason is self-selection: when people voluntarily self-select for creative, knowledge-intensive tasks, they are more likely than managers to choose tasks for which they are uniquely qualified.

APIs create an environment where anybody who wants to develop on top of their platforms can do so. No need to send you a formal request, just take those APIs and innovate. Then, if someone builds a great new service or capability, we'll work out a commercial licensing agreement so that everyone makes money.

This threatens entrenched barriers to entry, including the high costs of obtaining the financial, physical, and human capital necessary to compete.

- shares resources that were previously closely guarded

We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm.

Firms that cultivate nimble trust-based relationships with external collaborators are positioned to form vibrant business ecosystems that create value more effectively than hierarchially organized business.

Customer tool kits and context orchestration: Forget about static, immovable products. If your customers are going to treat products as platforms anyway, then you may as well get ahead of the game. Make your products modular, reconfigurable, and editable. Set the context for customer innovation and collaboration. Provide venues. Build user-friendly... See more

- behaves not as a multinational, but as a truly global firm

As long as communities have mechanisms for weeding out weak contributions, then large self-selecting communities of people in constant communication have a higher probability of matching the best people to the right tasks.

This utterly decentralized and amorphous force increasingly self-organizes to provide its own news, entertainment, and services.