Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams' 2006 🏷️#book arguing that self-organizing peers, working outside any firm's payroll, have become an economic force companies must open themselves to rather than defend against.
Published by Portfolio in December 2006, it names four principles — openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally — as the operating logic of a company built to collaborate with people it does not employ. The argument rests on an inversion of Ronald Coase's theory of the firm: as internet technologies collapse the cost of coordinating work beyond a company's walls, the boundary that once justified doing everything in-house moves, and open peer production becomes cheaper than hierarchy for a widening class of problems.
The book opens with the Goldcorp Challenge. In 2000 the Toronto gold miner published its proprietary geological survey data and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could say where to dig; entrants returned 110 targets, more than eighty percent of which proved productive, and the company's valuation rose from roughly $100 million to several billion. From cases like it Tapscott and Williams assemble the vocabulary the book is remembered for: ideagoras (open markets for unsolved R&D problems, as with InnoCentive), prosumers (customers who produce the value they consume), the new Alexandrians (open scientific and data commons), platforms for participation, the global plant floor, and the wiki workplace. 📝Wikipedia and Linux recur throughout as the reference implementations of peer production at scale.
Translated into more than twenty languages, Wikinomics was shortlisted for the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2007. Critics faulted its optimism — Harvard Business Review objected to the book's "breathless hype," and Choice noted that it largely sets aside groupthink and the less generous side of human motivation. Tapscott and Williams extended the thesis past business in the 2010 sequel Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.
This is the 2006 draft of the thesis 📝One Inc Cooperative runs on — that people who don't work for you can out-produce the ones who do. Where it stops short, and where 📝Mutualism picks up, is ownership: Tapscott's peers contribute, but they don't hold the upside.