Wikinomics

Introduction to Mass Collaboration

In the late 1990s, a gold-mining company called Goldcorp was on the brink of collapse. Its mine in Ontario was underperforming, and the company was buried in debt. Rob McEwen, the company’s leader, took a radical risk after learning how software developers created the Linux operating system by sharing their code with the world. He decided to take all of Goldcorp’s secret geological data and post it on the internet. He offered a cash prize to anyone who could help find the next big gold deposit. People from all over the world, including mathematicians and physicists who knew nothing about mining, identified new targets and turned a struggling business into a massive success.

This story illustrates a massive shift in how the modern world works. We are entering an era of mass collaboration, where traditional ways of doing business are being replaced by a new model called *peer production*. In the past, most people were either passive consumers or employees stuck in rigid hierarchies where a boss told them exactly what to do. Today, the internet provides low-cost tools that allow millions of people to link up in loose networks to create products, share news, and solve complex problems. This represents a fundamental change in how wealth and knowledge are created across the globe.

Don Tapscott suggests that this new reality is built on four core principles: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Openness means moving away from the idea that a company should keep everything secret. Smart organizations now realize that they cannot possibly hire all the smartest people in the world, so they must make their corporate boundaries porous. By being transparent and sharing information, companies build trust and invite outsiders to help them innovate.

Peering and sharing represent a new way of organizing work that moves away from traditional management. In peering, people self-organize to create something together because they are motivated by a shared goal, much like the volunteer programmers who built Linux. Sharing often feels counterintuitive to traditional business leaders who want to protect ideas with patents. However, many companies are finding that sharing certain foundational resources actually speeds up innovation and grows the entire market.

Finally, acting globally means treating the entire world as a single, unified workspace. A truly global company has no physical boundaries and builds a planetary system for designing and building products. This shift creates a new kind of economy where individuals have more power than ever before. We are seeing the rise of the *prosumer*, a person who both consumes and produces value. Businesses must learn to engage and cocreate with the world, as those who stick to secretive ways will find themselves unable to compete.