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Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything | 
| Authors: Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $7.48
You Save: $18.47 (71%)
New (5) Used (6) from $7.21
Rating:  95 reviews
Sales Rank: 2467
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.2
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.046
ASIN: B001IDZJKE
Publication Date: December 28, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In just the last few years, traditional collaborationin a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention centerhas been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century. Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You'll read about:
Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.
Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.
Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.
An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 90 more reviews...
 Outward condition good, but there was writing in the book. January 6, 2009
I would have preferred to be told behorehand that there was writing in the book itself. But other than, I was pleased with the speed of delivery and the book.
The evidence behind the claim January 5, 2009
And mass collaboration does change everything: education, business, science, politics, communication. This book is an excellent document, enfolding the how of the new media landscape and tool set, how they have allowed for a shift in collective progress, connecting people with ideas and broadcasting to the masses.
This book is especially valuable to business administrators who need a view into the new way of doing things, and a cabinet full of empirical evidence to sell stockholders and board members on why opportunity is awaiting engagement: collaboration as an effective business model, with financial and social dividends.
This book uses case studies and comprehensive language and organization to fire up the human spirit, rekindling the optimism of our culture and society's future potential, and the contemporary realization of that potential. This book stimulates ideological discussions about where we can go as a society, without the weight of the baggage of where we have been. But, this text is not a head -in-the-clouds wish list. Wikinomics is a perspective into the organic evolution of information and communication, a map of the affects the new tools and methods have had on everything.
 The Long Tripe, Wisdom of Hacks November 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The authors are hacks. This is the worst kind of pseudoscience, and it's way too long.
The authors build a case for various forms of collaboration using anecdotes and a few statistics (w/ fewer references). Before the reader has a chance to ask "how do I know collaboration was the factor that accelerated this company's growth" or "what else might have been going wrong at the other company" the authors quickly make up a few scientific sounding words and speak in broad generalizations about what successful companies of the future will do.
The following comes from page 103: "In the late 1990s P&G launched an internal survey and discovered it was spending $1.5 billion on R&D, generating lots of patents, but using less than 10 percent of them in it's own products. Yes, that's less than 10 percent!"
Thanks Tapscott, it really didn't sink in the first time, but now that you've repeated yourself and added an exclamation point, I'm blown away. Yes, blown away!
Don't bother to mentioning whether or not this is a reasonable number, how it compares to others in the industry, other industries that do more or less collaboration, or any other metrics to provide context for this statement. They never even explicitly show how this number changes as a result of collaboration.
The smartest thing the authors did was to create a title that rides Freakonomics' coat tails. It's not in the same class with that, or the Long Tail, Gladwell's books, Wisdom of Crowds, etc... this is the kind of tripe Taleb rails on.
They were clearly in a hurry to get Wikinomics the shelves before someone beat them to the punch with "The Wiki Point."
Could be helpful if you are new to the topic... October 8, 2008
As has already been stated, the view of the world of mass collaboration presented in this book is rather simplistic. It could be helpful, though, if you are new to the topic and would like to understand what "emergence", "wikis" and "prosumers" mean and how the term "knowledge" is changing in meaning.
 Sorely disappointing October 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I heard a lot of buzz about Wikinomics when it was published a few years ago, but when I finally picked it up a few weeks ago I was sorely disappointed. I'm very surprised that it gets such a high overall rating on Amazon.
First and foremost the book is extremely repetitive. I feel that instead of 300 odd pages it could have easily been under 100 while becoming significantly more readable. Granted, some sections are very well written, but I found most sections of the book difficult to read for more then 20-30 minutes at a time.
This is a subject that I'm very interested in, and am not clueless about, so perhaps I'm a bit biased in that I was already familiar with most of the ideas in the book. However, I still feel that there was way too much hyperbole and not enough critical analysis.
The 7 "business models" that the authors present (which aren't really business models) have so many things in common that dedicating a large chapter to each just doesn't make sense.
The authors use words like 'b-webs' that no one else uses as if they were widely used. Sure, one of the authors coined this word in one of his previous books but it hasn't caught. Deal with it. There's no need to try and force it on us here again.
When it comes to criticisms of the authors' ideas, they get brushed aside without any critical evaluation by just citing another author that agrees with Wikinomics and stating something along the lines of "X is wrong, but Y is right". Having some economic data would have been much more useful than stating "the tide is coming, get in line with the new business models" over and over.
Maybe the book would have been better if the authors published it through a Wiki? I think it would have quickly been edited down to about 70 pages then.
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