Chapter 1 of Wikinomics starts with a story about Goldcorp, and more specifically how the “Goldcorp Challenge” changed the fortunes of the company. In short, under the leadership of CEO Rob McEwen, Goldcorp made all the data they had available about their prospective goldmine freely available on the web, and offered up $575,000 in prize money for whomever could come up with the best way to find gold on their land.

Suffice to say, the contest was a success – the contestants identified 110 targets (50% of which had not been identified by the company before), 80% of the targets yielded significant quantities of gold, a $100 million company became a $9 billion one, and Rob (who is my neighbour) ended up with a much, much bigger house.

Now it’s unlikely that Google can 90-tuple in value (unless we’re going to have our first $18 Trillion company, which is almost what the entire NYSE is worth), but the $10 Million Android Challenge is going down a very similar path to what Goldcorp traversed – on what might be a much larger scale in many ways other that market cap growth.

The challenge is pretty straightforward – $10 Million is being offered up for the best apps – but the main story that lies behind it is all on this 6:24 YouTube video, and it’s really worth watching. To give you a preview, Sergy Brin (co-founder of Google) offers up the following in his opening dialog:

just like I learned how to write great services and software upon free tools for the web like Linux and Gnu, now with Android you’ll be able to the exact same things with mobile phones. The software is all free, the source is completely available, and we expect great new powerful applications to be developed on it. The SDK is being released right now, and you can download it…”

After this speech, Steve Horowitz (Engineering Director) comes on and dramatically announces that (contrary to popular belief) there is no G-phone – but he then goes into details about the Android platform, which he (and Google) hopes will enable people to create thousands of different G-phones (hello prosumers!), and provides a demo of what they have so far.

This is a great example of wikinomics in action – and once again, Google has proven itself to be a very different kind of company than most of its competitors. More to the point, if Goldcorp has already done it, and both Cisco and Google are currently doing it, what other companies might/ should be trying something similar?