Wikinomics (Book; Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams)

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 than a single firm with a much smaller set of resources to work with. This applies to domains such as research and engineering as much as it does to software, education and entertainment.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Traditional forms of intellectual property confer the right to exclude others from distributing a creative work. Peer production is more or less the opposite. Peer production is more or less the opposite. Communities of producers typically use "general public licenses" to guarantee users the right to share and modify creative works provided that any modifications are shared with the community. By opening up the right to modify and distribute, these open source licenses allow larger numbers of contributors to interact freely with larger amounts of information in search of new projects and opportunities for collaboration.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Today, billions of connected people around the planet can cooperate to make just about anything that requires human creativity, a computer, and an Internet connection. Unlike before, where the costs of production were high, people can collaborate and share their creations at very little cost. This means that individuals needn't rely on markets or capital-intensive firms to make or trade all of the goods and services they desire. In fact, a growing proportion of the things we value (including newspapers) can now be produced by us or in cooperation with the people we interact with socially - simply because we want to.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Embracing open source means embracing new mental models and new ways of conceptualizing value creation. It has long been fashionable to say that public goods are inimical to wealth creation. Economists and business leaders have frequently argued that what goes into the commons takes away from the mouths of private enterprise. Of course, a growing number realize that this is nonsense. Without the commons there could be no private enterprise. As Linus Torvalds aptly put it, "That's like saying public roadworks take away from the private commercial sector." Even if public ownership of key aspects of the transportation network forecloses oppoprtunities for private profit, the gains to the rest of the economy make these losses look minuscule.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Not all companies need a war chest of IP, but those that have none weaken their hand in the very negotiations required to get access to external IP in the first place. Without ideas and inventions of their own they may have little to use as bargaining chips in licensing and cross-licensing negotiations. They are forced by default to give up cash and/or royalties instead.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Firms often resist or ignore customer innovations. It took car manufacturers more than a decade to "invent" the pickup truck, after American farmers had spent years ripping the backseats out of their vehicles to make room for their goods and tools. Even when customer innovations look promising, most companies' internal processes have been too rigidly adapted to the manufacturer-centric paradigm to make use of them.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

The ability to continue to produce art without permission from the latter-day aristocracy of creativity is central to both cultural and economic progress. Whether it's bedroom DJs, garage innovators, or scientists in an advanced research laboratory, we don't want them consulting with attorneys all the time about the legality of what they're doing. Nor do we want them asking technologists for the encryption keys before they can even begin to engage in an act of creative enterprise. So much of what makes a free society and free economy healthy and vibrant is that we have limited the control points in a way that permits creation and experimentation in a largely anarchistic fashion.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Not all companies need a war chest of IP, but those that have none weaken their hand in the very negotiations required to get access to external IP in the first place. Without ideas and inventions of their own they may have little to use as bargaining chips in licensing and cross-licensing negotiations. They are forced by default to give up cash and/or royalties instead.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Of course, democratization is a scary word for those accustomed to ironclad control over creation and distribution of music. "But at some point," says Jim Griffin, the former head of technology at Geffen Records, "the music industry must come to a realization that they can hold a great deal more in an open hand than they can in a closed fist."

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

A new age of collaborative science is emerging that will accelerate scientific discovery and learning. The emergence of open-access publishing and new Web services will place infinite reams of knowledge in the hands of individuals and help weave globally distributed communities of peers. The rise of large-scale collaborations in domains such as earth sciences and biology, meanwhile, will help scientific communities launch an unprecedented attack on problems such as global warming and HIV/AIDS. All considered, leading scientific observers expect more change in the next fifty years than in the last four hundred years of inquiry.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

The current publishing regime emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, when the pace of discovery was glacial by twenty-first-century standards. Scientific journals provided the primary infrastructure for scholarly communication and collaboration. Apart from annual academic symposiums, journals were the place where scientists could find out about, engage with, and carefully critique each other's work. Publishing journals was expensive, entailing significant capital and operational costs.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

When fully assembled, open-access libraries will provide unparalleled access to humanity's stock of knowledge. Improved access to knowledge, in turn, will help deepen and broaden the progress of science, giving everyone from high school students to entrepreneurs the opportunity to tap its insights.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Winning in a world of cocreation and combinatorial innovation is all about building a loyal base of innovators that make your ecosystem stronger, more dynamic, and more expedient than the ecosystems of rivals in creating new value for customers. To achieve this, your organization - regardless of the the sector or line of business - needs to identify and open up platforms to enable mass collaboration.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Winning companies today have open and porous boundaries and compete by reaching outside their walls to harness external knowledge, resources and capabilities. Even the stodgy, capital-intensive manufacturing industries are no exception to this rule. Indeed, there is no part of the economy where this opening and blurring of corporate boundaries has more revolutionary potential.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Highly collaborative approaches to manufacturing are not without risk. First there is a risk that suppliers and assemblers will gauge the market differently and create gaps in supply and demand. But with a variety of suppliers to choose from, assemblers can rely on multiple sources for common components, reducing the risks of undercapacity. Second, the lack of integration between suppliers and assemblers may lead to mismatched parts or suboptimal construction. Face-to-face relationships appear to be crucial to overcoming these challenges. In Chongquing, as in many other industrial clusters, informal networks share information about trends and market intelligence, and establish trust among a broad collection of employees and firms. People go to teahouses in their spare time, where entrepeneurs coordinate ideas for future design and knockoff projects.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

The problem is that media incumbents are moving too slowly. They're getting mired in the thick underbrush of thorny contractual agreements and outdated costly infrastructures. What's worse is that the economic foundation of the industry is based on a business model suited for the era of analog publishing, not for a world of user-driven creation and distribution. These institutions are powerful and deeply engrained [ingrained] in the industry's social and economic contract. It's hard for senior executives to imagine a world where their companies could lose control of the very resources they have monopolized for so long.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Most technologists agree that DRM is a lost cause (hackers reverse engineer it just as fast as it gets produced). Besides that, it's simply bad for customers. And in a world where customers rule, that means DRM is bad for business. Most publishers won't accept this, however. And the result is that new business models for open content will not come from traditional media establishments, but from companies such as Google, Yahoo and YouTube.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

William Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth, has already proposed to charge fees in exchange for giving one web vendor's traffic priority over the traffic of a competitor. If Yahoo pays the freight, BellSouth users find Yahoo's search engine works faster and better than Google's. So, in effect, BellSouth becomes a gatekeeper for the types of services that thrive on the Internet - an Internet where bandwidth and content-delivery rights are auctioned off to the highest bidders. This poses a grave threat to the Internet - a threat that could extinguish the fire of innovation that has spurred countless new businesses, including most of the examples discussed in this book. This is not just a war against the open Internet; it's a war against competitiveness, and a war against innovation. In short, it's a war against the future.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf reminds us that the remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The three golden rules - nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and anybody can add services to it - are what distinguish the Internet from any previous communications medium.

"By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network," says Cerf, "the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has lead to an explosion of offerings that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design." Indeed, services such as Skype, Google, flickr, Linux, MySpace, and Wikipedia might still be just a twinkle in some person's eye.
-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

In the end, people and technology move forward. And just as sure as the ocean's waves wash away beach sand, companies that choose to stand still will be swept aside by the momentum.

-- Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

A growing number of smart companies are learning that openness is a force for growth and competitiveness. As long as you're smart about how and when, you can blow open the windows and unlock the doors to build vast business ecosystems on top of what we call platforms for participation.

-- Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

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