Today with the advances in technology, people are able to collaborate in a whole new way and meaning. The new promise of peer production will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously. With more and more firms being able to collaborate, it is nothing but good things as everyone can bring a certain quality to the table, for example, the building of a plane or assembling a motorbike.
With a click of a button people have the ability to share knowledge, facts, or just regular comments with everyone who wishes to read it. This is known as the digital Commons. Wikipedia for example allows people from around the world to edit and put up information onto the web, with the aim that this information is true. As a result is has become the biggest encyclopedia in the world.
The evolution of the internet is driving this new age with the increase in computer power, network capability along with the new technology bringing new tools required to get organized, create value and compete. This is the new web: the Web 2.0, the living web. It has many names but either way the new web is about communities, participation and peering. Even a simple act of participating in a new community makes a contribution to the new digital commons linking more than a billion people worldwide.
With this change however, companies have had to adjust and realize that the pace and change that companies can no longer depend only on internal capabilities to meet external needs. Nor can they rely on tight relationships with a couple of business partners to help keep up with customers desires for speed, innovation and control. Instead companies must engage and co-create a dynamic fashion with everyone.
How companies and societies harness knowledge is affecting just about every sector of society and every aspect of management. This as a result is creating a new type of business thinking. Companies will now innovate, differentiate, and compete by doing certain things right: by having superior human capital: protecting their property and focusing on their customers not only globally but locally as well. This new art of science of wikinomics is based on four powerful new ideas, which are replacing some of the old trends of business.
1. Being open – “Companies have recently been rethinking openness, and this is beginning to affect a number of important functions, including human resources, innovation, industry standards, and communications”.(p21) People and institutions that interact with firms are gaining unprecedented access to important information about corporate behavior, operations, and performance. Armed with new tools to find out, inform others and self-organize. This is allowing customers to see the true quality of products better along with the ability to communicate, whistle blow, googleing, and putting each company under the spot light. Other ways of being open is the ability to allow students from around the world the access and ability to educate themselves at op universities in different countries and access the courses curriculum for free.
2. Peering – “A new form of horizontal organization is forming, which is challenging the rival hierarchical firms in its capacity to create information-based products and services, and in some cases physical things”. (p23) This new form is known as peering. Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization. A style of production that works better than the hierarchical management for certain tasks. Its greatest impact today is the production of informational goods, software, entertainment and culture.
3. Sharing – Today, people are easily able to download and listen, watch, share music and films with a few clicks of a button. Unfortunately if these products were free and easily made then that would be good, but as many things cost a lot of money to make, then how do these companies recoup their investment and gain a profit. Hollywood as a result has managed information and meter information to consumers which also allows the companies to control people behaviors. Many companies are however finding that treating intellectual properties like a mutual fund allows them to manage a balanced portfolio of IP assets, some protected and some shared. “Of course companies need to protect their crown jewels, but companies have to realize that they will not be able to collaborate effectively if they do not share some of their IP” (p27).
4. Acting Globally - Today with globalization, and the integration of national economies, is allowing new titans to emerge such as China/India, and South Korea. While developed countries are worrying about growing dependency ratios, most of the population and consumer demand will take place in the developing nations. “Staying globally competitive means monitoring business developments internationally and tapping a much larger global talent pool. Global alliances, human capital marketplaces, and peer production communities will provide access to new communities providing new access to new markets, ideas and technologies” (p29).
These four principles define how twenty first century corporations compete. “This has changed from the once hierarchical, closed, secretive; insular that dominated the previous century”. (p30) The ability to mass communicate has allowed countries to develop stringer bonds and help build a new generation of tools, thinking and technology. Who knows where everything will be in the next twenty years, but I know it will continue to grow allowing more countries to develop as a result and bring nothing but new positive advances to the world.
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