Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

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

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.

A new kind of business is emerging: one that

- shares resources that were previously closely guarded

Losers innovated internally. Winners innovated with their users. Losers jealously guarded their data and software interfaces. Winners shared them with everyone.

Om Malik blog post : "I wonder if this culture of participation was helping build businesses on our collective backs. If we tag, bookmark, or share and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commerical entities, aren't we commoditizing our most valuable asset: time? We become the outsourced workforce, though it is still unclear what ... See more

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.

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.

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