Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott, one of the world's leading authorities on business strategy, is Chief Executive of New Paradigm, which he co-founded in 1993. He is an internationally sought authority, consultant and speaker on business strategy and organizational transformation. His clients include top executives of many of the world's largest corporations and government leaders from many countries. The Washington Technology Report called him one of the most influential media authorities since Marshall McLuhan. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
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May 13th, 2008, 11:27am
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For those that might have missed it, I just wanted to give a heads up on a Wall Street Journal article posted yesterday by L. Gordon Crovitz: From Wikinomics to the Government 2.0. This is a very exciting area of development, and we hope to collaborate with all of you in the future to revolutionize the way that government works. While you’re at it, you may want to read about five of the things I have learned about collaboration.
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May 5th, 2008, 09:21am
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Just wanted to bring to everyone’s attention the new “Wikinomics in Action” section in the right hand side column. The idea behind it is just like it sounds - to highlight companies and organizations that are putting the wikinomics principles to work. I highly recommend people take a tour through the links that we’ve put up so far to get a real feel for what’s going on - it ranges from “classics” like Second Life, YouTube and Innocentive, to newer developments that have been highlighted on this blog like Nokia Productions and the Dilbert mash ups. More importantly, the list is far from complete, and we want it to continually evolve - so feel free to make a recommendation on this post, or send us a comment, whenever and wherever you see wikinomics in action!
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April 28th, 2008, 07:36am
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Alex Williams had an interesting piece yesterday in the NY Times - Not So Personal Finance. The main message can be seen from the following quote:
At 22, Ms. Green, like her friends, is less afraid to flirt with what many over 35 consider the last taboo in American life: discussing salary openly with friends and colleagues. “There’s just more of a feeling of openness in discussing what you make,” Ms. Green said
Actually, the quote is a little misleading - the friend part is right, but as the article goes on to note that 84% of young workers agree that “you should never let your co-workers know how much you make” (compared to 90% for 35+). There were also a few other quotes using some key words wikinomics readers should be used to:
“This is a generation that is much more attuned to teamwork, collaboration and sharing information. Everything they do is a kind of group event. How do you know, when you get your first job offer, if $45,000 is a good offer, a bad offer or an O.K. offer? You go to your friends.” - Bill Coleman
Several workers under 35 said that greater salary transparency among friends only makes sense in an age when there is so much information freely available online. Young professionals, in fact, have all sorts of ways to find out how much their friends make, even without asking.
But social scientists say that some young people have generation-specific motives for broaching this touchy subject. Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell, said that an open flow of information is deemed crucial by young professionals who think of themselves as free agents, not company men.
Anyone else noticing these trends at work?
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April 21st, 2008, 11:53am
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To coincide with the launch of the expanded version of the Wikinomics book, I am proud to announce that the Wikinomics team has also revised and expanded our blog to include several new features! These include:
- Featured comments and post sections
- Most popular entries
- Wikinomics in the blogosphere
- Photos and bios of our contributors
As always, we love hearing from you, our collaborators. Please let us know what you think. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.
Enjoy!
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April 21st, 2008, 11:40am
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David Browne published an interesting piece in the NY Times this weekend entitled On the Internet, It’s All About ‘My’. His focus is on how the ‘My’ prefix is attaching itself to so many things online - see MySpace, MyCoke, MyAOL, MyIBM, etc. - in an “increasingly customized world of technology.” Quoting Pete Blackshaw from the article:
“Companies are trying to connect with consumers in more meaningful ways. They’re trying to emulate consumer behavior. Everyone’s trying to be more authentic and connect with consumers on their terms. They can look more real, sincere and authentic.”
However, looking more real, sincere and authentic is different than being more real, sincere and authentic - and various people are quoted towards the end of the article explaining why the “my” phase is going away. There speculation over what will replace it centres around “we” - because as Nick Bartle notes:
“In our research, values like participation now vastly outrank self-interest. People want to be connected and part of a community.”
Indeed they do - and I would surmise that people don’t particularly care about whether “we”, “our”, or “exo” is the prefix of the day in some marketing talk. What they care about is companies being real, sincere and authentic - so the question is how would (say) an “OurCoke” strategy operate differently than a “myCoke” one?
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April 14th, 2008, 02:06pm
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Very interesting writeup in the Globe and Mail today highlighting some research that presents some very interesting findings about the Net Generation of employees that are now entering the workforce. According to the article,
Myth
• Millennials are not really engaged at work, and will probably job-hop a lot.
• They demand instant feedback, even when applying for a job.
• Their tech-savvy will crush older generations.
Reality
• Millennials score the same on measures of career engagement as Gen-Xers and baby boomers.
• They’re willing to go through a long job application process.
• They prefer online tools, but don’t necessarily have more experience than Xers and boomers.
Read More »
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March 31st, 2008, 07:10am
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A few readers might have seen these quotes in last week’s press release, but I wanted to post them here as well:
“The old-school way of doing business hides problems and creates inefficiencies. Radical collaboration solves those problems. It brings the best minds together, exposes hidden risks, and accelerates innovation and growth. We’ve seen how it transforms industries, such as music and entertainment. But now it’s time to take the same approach to the most serious problems – problems with the gravest consequences for the economy and society. Leaders need to change their habits and open the curtain.”
“The subprime mess happened because big financial players hid the risks – they weren’t found until it was too late. If the same players had taken the radical step of sharing information about the bets they were structuring, the best minds – including economic policymakers – could have seen what was happening and taken steps to avert it.”
Does anyone have any thoughts on this argument that they’d like to share?
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March 28th, 2008, 12:07pm
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It seems that Canada may have finally woken up to the Net Neutrality issue that’s recieved far, far more press in the U.S. - though I’d still argue not enough. (If you want a really good detail on all the history behind Net Neutrality, the wikipedia page on this topic is amazing, right down to the 66 references and footnotes that could keep you reading for days.)
In short, my feelings are that a lack of Net Neutrality is something that damages the Internet experience for everyone, and by extension threatens many of the amazing innovations and collaborative tools that are trying to emerge. Thankfully, we might be reaching a point where this issue gets dealt with once and for all.
David Reed’s opening statement to the FCC Commissioners on Net Neutrality (with particular reference to what Comcast has been up to) is pointed in the right direction. To quote his three main points:
Read More »
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March 24th, 2008, 06:16am
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I have to credit Darren Neimke’s Live Portal Page for helping me find this - an interview with Mike Shaver, Chief Evangelist of Mozilla, talking about all kinds of things having to do with managing an Open Source Project. There are a lot of really great insights from a guy on the forefront of the open source movement. Here’s a few of my favorite quotes:
Scaling through the community, not just technically but in terms of organizational resilience, is really important to us.
One of the best ways to motivate the developer community at large is to go get yourself 130 million users.
That conservatism helps us in a lot of core technical ways. It keeps us from getting ahead of our users.
Read More »
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March 18th, 2008, 07:22am
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A picture is worth a thousand words… and I think that a few well-chosen graphs from Alexa.com can be worth even more than that. The following three are among my favorites to help tell the story of what’s been happening over the past few years:
Read More »
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March 13th, 2008, 09:40am
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Modeling surprise, probabilistic chips, NanoRadio, Wireless Power, Atomic Magnometers, Offline web applications, Graphene Transistors, Connectomics, Reality Mining, and Cellulolytic Enzymes. There you go - the Technology Review (published by MIT) top-10 of technologies that “we think are most likely to change the way we live.” Normally I wouldn’t give away their entire list, but I have a hunch that the vast majority of people might need a little bit of help to figure out what at least one of those things are. You can find the links to all the individual descriptions here, in addition to the top-10 lists for each year from 2001 - 2008.
There’s some fascinating stuff in the older lists - DRM predictions from 2001, Grid computing in 2003, and Universal Memory from 2005 to name a few. For those interested in where technology is going, and where people thought technology was going but a few years ago, it’s a great site to cruise around. Anything in particular jump off the page at anyone?
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March 11th, 2008, 10:34am
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We’ve talked a lot about big companies reaching outside the traditional corporate boundaries in order to get that talent they need to drive innovation, and it’s a theme that’s increasingly being covered throughout the mainstream press. However, the focus generally continues to be on finding that one, uniquely qualified mind to tackle a particular problem - think “rogue scientist” attracted to the GoldCorp Challenge, Innocentive, etc. Such Ideagoras are not bad things by any stretch of the imagination, but there are other ways to drive innovation as well.
As Kerry Capell reported in Business Week last week, the Raymond Conference decided to take a different angle on open innovation this year: focus on fostering cooperation between design teams at big global companies in radically different markets. Think: Heineken, Lego, Philips, Hewlett Packard, and others coming together… what might they come up with? Read More »
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March 10th, 2008, 06:25am
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Who’s going to win the battle for Wikipedia’s Soul: the inclusionists or the deletionists?
It is this question that lies at the heart of a very interesting article in The Economist. The inclusionists argue that Wikipedia should feature as many articles as it’s contributors can produce, so long as even a few users find it interesting. Let’s just call it the “longest of the long tail” strategies. In contrast, deletionists believe the site would be more successful if it “maintains a certain relevance and quality for its enteries.” To read a humourous post about deletionists at their best, see Mike Dover’s post from October.
The bulk of the article seems to push people towards supporting the inclusionists, as it covers the increasingly infamous Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Wikipedia in great detail. Read More »
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March 6th, 2008, 06:44am
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As I noted last October, the peer-reviewed First Monday journal has long been a great and insightful source of information on the web. Of course, I don’t agree with everything that makes it in there. With that in mind, here’s a quote from a recent article called Market Ideology and the Myths of the Web 2.0 by Trebor Scholz.
Wikinomics co–author Don Tapscott hearts Web 2.0. He really does; it makes him think of authenticity, openness, the relinquishing of control, the sharing of code and most importantly, the building on the efforts of others… With great clarity and an elegant writing style, the Wikinomics authors communicate this brave new world of Web 2.0 to the business priesthood. Tapscott describes with single–minded focus how to squeeze profits out of peer–to–peer technologies and even refers to the Katrina People Finder project. When interpreting the new conditions for production and consumption online, his sole mission is a socially friction–free update of the timeworn capitalist power dynamics. He discovers and celebrates how today, perhaps more than ever, fewer and fewer people can become richer and richer by using the very many who earn less and less. Read More »
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March 3rd, 2008, 06:40am
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As we’ve written about in the past, Japan has a tendency to be a bit ahead of the curve in technology - particularly in relation to robots. For those that haven’t been keeping up on this topic, I recommend starting with this photo gallery on - some of the slides are absolutely fascinating, some are a little creepy, and some are a little of both. Flute playing, ballroom dancing, traffic control, hospital service, warriors, tea servers… robots are being used (or at least tested) for an ever-growing number of things in Japan, and the USA Today has an interesting story on this development here. A few of the more interesting quotes:
Robots are already taken for granted in Japanese factories, so much so that they are sometimes welcomed on their first day at work with Shinto religious ceremonies. Robots make sushi. Robots plant rice and tend paddies.
Japan is already an industrial robot powerhouse. Over 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan in 2005, about 40% of the global total and 32 robots for every 1,000 Japanese manufacturing employees, according to a recent report by Macquarie, which had no numbers from subsequent years.
For Japan, the robotics revolution is an imperative. With more than a fifth of the population 65 or older, the country is banking on robots to replenish the workforce and care for the elderly.
For Hiroshi Ishiguro, also at Osaka University, the key is to make robots that look like human beings. His Geminoid robot looks uncannily like himself — down to the black, wiry hair and slight tan.
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February 28th, 2008, 06:20am
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Just a quick heads up that John Hagel and John Seely Brown have a great little article in BusinessWeek, which talks about lessons Western executives can learn from Tata’s $2,500 Nano. All I’m going to give you from the article are the four subtitles, which should pique the interest of wikinomics readers:
1. Think outside the patent box
2. A modular design revolution
3. “Open Distribution” Innovation
4. Welcoming users back into the design loop
As always, John and John are well worth reading… are there any other lessons from the Nano that jump off the page?
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February 26th, 2008, 01:58pm
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During a recent game developers conference, Nintendo’s Takashi Aoyama announced a new Pay to Play program. Details were few and far between, but it appears that it will go like this - Nintendo will begin charging for certain parts of certain online games. In order to help limit customer confusion, such games will have a red “Pay to Play” sticker on the bottom. Payment will be done by Wii points. Everything else appears to be up in the air still (at least in terms of public disclosure).
This has led to a bit of a guessing game about what exactly Nintendo is up to, given that they have been vocal about maintaining the “free” price point for online game access in the past. Comment boards were made for guessing games, and if you scroll through ones like this there are a some interesting insights scattered throughout. Notably, it would appear that this is being set-up so 3rd party studios can sell games through the Nintendo Wii platform… which could evolve into a very interesting wikinomics business model indeed.
But I don’t want to speculate too much yet - just keep an eye on how Nintendo’s Wii platform, Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 2.0, and others evolve and compete against each other as game makers, experience creators, platform providers, and a variety of other ways. It’s one of those industries that is on the bleeding edge of change, and there will likely be valuable lessons for people in all sorts of other industries.
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February 19th, 2008, 11:52am
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I found this combination of stories on Wired very, very interesting. The first is on the Chinese Government’s plans for nanotechnology, based on interviews with 60 Chinese officials. The research was set-up in the specific context of China’s stated, over-arching goal of leap-frogging the west by learning from them (technology transfer) and increasing domestic research capacity (indigenous innovation). Nanotechnology is identified as one of four Chinese science “megaprojects”, and the central goal is to catch-up to the U.S. on research capability by 2020.
The second is also on the topic of nanotechnology - specifically, that only 1/3 of Americans believe Nanotechnology is morally acceptable. Notably, this compares to slightly over half in European countries. The researcher claims the lack of belief in America is explained almost entirely by religion. While a plausible case may be made, I’ll remind you of a quote from Brendan’s recent post - a prediction that intelligent nanobots go into our brains through capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons. I could see quite a few people, religous and otherwise, resisting that.
Regardless of the exact explanation, there are a lot of interesting wikinomics angles to consider on the nanatechnology front… particularly as it relates to different government structures around the world, innovation, globalization, etc.
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February 15th, 2008, 02:01pm
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How MAKE magazine describes itself should make clear to any wikinomics reader why we are so interested in the site:
MAKE Magazine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. MAKE is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. We celebrate your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.
In other words, it truly is the bible of a generation of prosumers who are customizing and innovating with all the technology around them. I strongly recommend that you regularly check out the site, if for no other reason than getting a sneak peek on all the cool innovations floating around there that you’d otherwise never hear of. To mention a few hot spots:
- the main blog page is the prime destination for staying up-to-date.
- The Make Flickr pool competition is a fascinating collection of pictures.
- The new “MADE in Japan” blog section will be particularly interesting to many North American readers, who may or may not know Japan tends to be a few years ahead of us in technology innovation.
- The how-to DVD rental space (powered by SmartFlix) could help a lot of people… though the lack of direct-download option is curious.
- As a side note, it appears part of their advertising done through Federated Media, a very interesting company that deserves a blog post on here soon.
Of course, there are also literally thousands of interesting little innovations posted all over the blog, etc… like this scary looking Handheld 3-D Scanner. Anyone want to point us towards some of their favorites?
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February 5th, 2008, 06:51am
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The New York Times had a great article yesterday that focused on a growing backlash against China’s pervasive online censorship system - also known as the Great Firewall. Interestingly enough, it seems that many people in China didn’t even realize there was much of a system in place, but have learned of it’s presence thanks to a growing appetite for sites like Flickr and YouTube. In terms of the importance some place on the fight to overcome such censorship, to quote one brave soul who has taken a branch of China Telecom to court over some restrictions on Web content:
“The Americans have an expression, ‘You can’t fight City Hall. However, I believe that with the help of today’s Internet, the mood of the public, I can win this case. I can even make a contribution to improving Chinese democracy.”
Many think fights such as these can’t be won, and the fact that the Olympics are coming to China shortly will make this a very, very interesting issue. While some people argue that the country won’t do anything to drastically harm their reputation when the spotlight is about to shine at it’s brightest, stories like this one by Jim Yardley indicate the crackdown might get worse. Notably, only state-sanctioned companies will be allowed to broadcast video and audio online, and China arrested no fewer than 51 online dissidents last year (far more than any other country) according to Reporters without Borders.
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