• Title: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• Author: Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (December 28, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1591841380
• ISBN-13: 978-1591841388

This was a good book and worth the cost and time to read.

The book begins with seven aspects of what Tapscott and Williams call “the collaboration economy”:

1. Peer Pioneers – Open source and Wikipedia are examples – where dispersed volunteers create quick value
2. Ideagoras – Marketplaces for ideas
3. Prosumers – Customer-driven innovation
4. New Alexandrians – A new science of sharing
5. Platforms for Participation – Opening up products and infrastructures so large communities of partners can create value
6. Global Plant Floor – Manufacturing-intensive global ecosystems for building new physical goods
7. Wiki Workplace – Mass collaboration in the workplace

While this book sees this as a disruptive revolution, I see this as a movement of ideas percolating for years in laboratories (for example, the world-wide web was originally built to allow physics scientists to easily and quickly share research results on the early internet).

I think the most important suggestion (and an undercurrent throughout the book) is that business leaders need to listen and watch their customers more carefully than ever before. Instead of taking old, knee-jerk reactions to ways customers act, we need to start taking advantage of those actions.