I’ve just found out about Wikinomics, a new book exploring the power of collaboration and how it can not only add value to a company, but absolutely change the playing field. An example from the Newsfactor.com story:
When Rob McEwan became CEO of Goldcorp, he and company geologists knew that their property contained untapped resources “thirty times the amount Goldcorp was currently mining!”
But with 55,000 acres, nobody at Goldcorp could figure out where to look for the buried treasure. To avert a wild goose chase, McEwan shared on the Web Goldcorp’s geological data going back to 1948 and offered $575,000 in prizes to those who could come up with the best way to find and extract the gold.
Participants in the contest found 55 drilling targets Goldcorp had not identified. Eighty percent hit pay dirt. “In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found” and in four years Goldcorp’s cost of production dropped 600%.
Tapscott and Williams say Goldcorp took advantage of a new economic paradigm they call wikinomics: a word combining economics and Wikipedia — the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. This model of wealth creation is based on collaboration and sharing the authors call peering.
The book sounds appealing, especially since they discuss a process that applies to the open source model, and takes the concept well beyond development. There a PDF preview of the introduction and first chapter available on their site and, on something that’s half them eating their own dogfood and half stunt, the authors are starting a wiki for the Wikinomics playbook.