This blog post is going to introduce some key points from the esteemed book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams and provide some tangible examples about how companies can use them.

Wikinomics refers to the recent phenomenon of user generated content in social media and mass collaboration. Tapscott and Williams argue that how individuals interact with each other and with society has fundamentally changed and in order to be successful companies, governments and people need to unleash the power of mass collaboration.

The book starts by highlighting Time magazine`s choice for person of the year in 2006 was “You – the online collaborator.”

In Hawaiian, wiki means quickly. Wikinomics is now about companies can “conceive, design, develop and distribute products and services in profoundly new ways”. While Wikipedia is probably the most well-known wiki site, this post is going to look at an unusual example.

Enter Canadian mining company Goldcorp. In 2000, Goldcorp’s CEO Rob McEwen was facing significant problems, Goldcorp had the rights to explore gold ore deposit in Red Lake and they needed help.

Inspired by the development of Linux’s open collaboration methods, McEwen established the Goldcorp Challenge. Goldcorp set $575K in prize money and provided “every scrap of information about the 55,000 acre property” on their website. Within weeks – submissions came in from across the world and eventually Goldcorp was able to leverage that mass collaboration and transform itself from a $100M company to a $9B company.

Now this is obviously suffers from winner’s bias, this was a very risky move that could have gone sideways. However, it demonstrates an extreme example that should help make the case about how valuable mass collaboration in the modern business world can be. It also teaches us some valuable lessons about how companies can use mass collaboration to improve performance.

Lesson 1: Everyone can use them – There is room for mass collaboration even with the most secretive companies as demonstrated in the example above by Goldcorp.

Lesson 2: Employee engagement – Mass collaboration and the use of wikis can help engage employees. For example Bell Canada uses internal wikis as an “idea exchange”. Employees submit ideas and are voted on by staff. Best Buy also has a voluntary outlet where they can share positive customer experiences, best practices, etc.

Lesson 3: Improve efficiency- Internal wikis can also improve internal efficiency by enabling staff (within and outside of your organization) to manage projects better (e.g. posting proposals, FAQs, best practices, etc.) – which can reduce emails and increased the quality of documentation.

Overall, there is lots of potential to harness the power of mass collaboration, the challenge for companies will be figuring out how best it can satisfy their needs.