Interests: Wikinomics

Being a great believer and user of wikis in my teaching of business English, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams's book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and it's subject - how companies are beginning to use mass collaboration of knowledge to gain success is naturally of particular interest to me.

The authors give examples of how firms are tapping into expertise from outside their companies by encouraging the collaboration of their customers, users and informed contributors. To be able to cite examples like these of how businesses are gaining very real advantages from using web based collaborative tools will be a great help in convincing business students who are at times reluctant to use Web 2.0 tools such as wikis in their learning.

In the following Newsnight interview with Don Tapscott the point is made that this mass collaboration has a commercial basis with people being encouraged to participate by the prospect of reward, and not simply out of sense of altruistic public spiritedness. Again this is an extremely important factor when asking students who are being trained to think in terms of business models to adopt collaborative learning technologies.



To read the introduction of the book and see the video in its original context follow this link to the Newsnight archive.

The book was brought to my attention by my The Consultants-e colleague Andrei - many thanks!