This post originally appeared on one of my class sites. I have made some slight edits and then reposted it over here on my personal site.
Wikinomics follows a similar trend that the Cluetrain Manifesto follows, in that both seem highly influenced by the trends spilling out from Web 2.0. The Cluetrain Manifesto demanded that companies be honest, open and take part in the economy through communication with all, whether it be members of the company, consumers or others. Wikinomics, also, insists that successful companies need to follow the Web 2.0 elements of being open and allowing a spirit of participation. The focus of Wikinomics though, isn’t so much about a conversation with others, but on opening up a company to outsiders and thus allowing participation by many, even those who aren’t paid by the company.
This seems to fly in the face of what Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, beleives for he thinks that allowing participation by “non-professionals” is a truly bad thing and will lead to less valuable work. What Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and others, such as Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat, argue though is that this new shift, in which companies open up some of their data or proprietary information and allow others outside the company to take part in shaping and being a part of the success of the company, is really the shape of the future and is actually good for companies.
Tapscott shows how much of this shift came about through the open source community, which led to great strides in a variety of software and computer technologies. Both Friedman and Tapscott show as an example the company Goldcorp. Goldcorp is a gold mining company based in Canada that through opening up their data and propietary information to the world were able to improve their ability to find gold, increase their profits and allowed technological advancements. This came about through the achievements of many outsiders working to solve the problem for this goldmining company.
What wikinomics shows is that giving up some things for free, but holding back a few key proprietary elements of one’s company can be good for a company. In the world now, companies that don’t wish to share are only hurting themselves.
Wikinomics can be seen in the numerous ventures and alliances being set up. Through some of these ventures not only do companies open data up so that others can work on or use it, but they are maximizing the number of individuals who can assist in solving a problem that a company is working on or even more so helping grow the succes of the company.
One of the best examples of this is a concept pulled from Web 2.0 and is known as “crowdsourcing”. What crowdsourcing allows is the greatest number of individuals to be used to tackle a problem and create a solution. In other words, it is asking the assistance of a crowd, rather than select individuals. Despite Andrew Keen’s abhorrance of the idea, this practice is actually benefitting a number of companies. Tapscott shows that this is partially able to work because individuals choose what they wish to work on and when individuals have a motiviation to help out they are more likely to make a contribution than someone who has little interest. The key is people show an interest and then decide to help. It is not a matter of everybody or a mass of amateurs rushing out to help a company or to solve some problem, but rather motivated individuals, often with some knowledge in the area or interest that allows them to be of use.
This spirit of change has come about largely through Web 2.0. Through creating tools and environments that have encouraged innovation, participation, openness, access to large amounts of data and leveraging the crowd Web 2.0 has become an agent of social change. It is not just a technological trend, but a social movement as well.
As mentioned earlier, the open source community has resulted in many technological leaps from the Linux operating system, to Apache (which has become a dominant platform for most websites), to the development of competing resources, such as the Firefox browser. Companies have come to realize that this environment of cooperativeness can be beneficial.
As Tapscott points out, among some of the companies that have latched on to this trend are pharmaceutical companies. Some of them have taken to sharing their data with others in the community, as well as retired or independent scientists. This allows a greater pool of resources or talent in solving scientific problems for these companies. Many other such endeavors are under way or are sure to develop in solving a variety of scientific and technical problems.
So despite what naysayers, like Andrew Keen or David Scott Lewis, may think will happen because of a reliance on crowdsourcing it seems instead that there is great promise as well for this trend. As an article in Wired magazine on the changing face of the newsroom demonstrates, crowdsourcing is much more likely to not only change businesses, but allow them to continue to succeed hand in hand with professionals working within those businesses.
One of the best things that can be said about Web 2.0 is that it has allowed many to look at things in a new way. As Carol Jones, of IBM, states
“It opens people’s minds to something they hadn’t realized was possible.”
Thus, Web 2.0 has helped generate new ways of looking at things, such as in business and the Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics are great examples of this.
Wikinomics seems to show great promise as a model to follow in shaping a new way of conducting business. This doesn’t mean to follow blindly and show all of one’s data or necessarily allow everyone to help one’s business. These might be valid things to follow, but one also needs to look at one’s business and figure out how to best implement the philosophy of Wikinomics into one’s company to make it work.