It’s the day after Christmas and you didn’t receive a copy of the new John Grisham novel you were hoping to find under the tree. There are 2 more weeks before classes resume and you are looking for a good book. I just finished MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (Portfolio/Penguin,2010,424 pp). This is an update of their best-selling Wikinomics published 4 years ago ,which predicted the mass internet-enabled collaboration that lies behind such phenomena as Wikipedia and the Linux open-source operating system.
Basically, this is a book proclaiming a new world in which innovation and problem-solving are accomplished through networked intelligence. Tapscott and Williams use examples of real companies to illustrate the reshaping of the worlds of green energy, transportation, education, health care, media, and government. Many of these industries seem stuck in the past and unable to move forward. Yet people with drive, passion, and expertise are taking advantage of web-based collaboration to revolutionize the way we work, learn, create, and govern.
Here are a few examples:
P&G’s “Connect and Develop” research project, which basically used internet connections to 200,000 scientists world-wide to get new ideas for products, paying fees from $10,000 to $2 million for over 1,000 new technologies.
An Iraq war veteran whose startup car company (called Local Motors) is “staffed” by 4,500 competing designers and supplied by factories around the world.
An on-line community for people with life -altering diseases.
An astronomer who is mapping the universe with the help of 250,000 citizen scientists.
This is not a short book, so I would recommend reading the 1st four chapters, the last 2 chapters (18 and 19), and any of the middle chapters that interest you (these talk about specific industries). It might be worthwhile for profs to read Ch.8’s controversial ideas about education, called “Rethinking the University: Collaborative Learning”.
If you did get the Grisham book, please send it to me when you are done and we can swap!