Forget everything you know about the way we so business. In this seven part series, co-authors of Wikinomics: How Mass collaboration Changes Everything, due out Jan. 2, explain new business models that will empower the prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust.
The Alexandrian Greeks were inspired by a simple, but powerful idea: Collect all of the books, all of the histories, all of the great literature, all of the plays, all of the mathematical and scientific treatises of the age and store them in one building.
In other words, take the sum of mankind's knowledge and share it for the betterment of science, the arts, wealth, and the economy.
The Alexandrians came very, very close to achieving that goal. At the collection's crowning glory, estimates suggest they had accumulated more than half a million volumes.
When the library was destroyed in the 5th century, it was a major setback for the arts and sciences. The effects were not permanent, fortunately. In fact, the stock of human knowledge now doubles every five years. And, thanks to a new generation of Alexandrians, this fountain of knowledge, past and present, will soon be accessible in ways our ancestors could only dream of.
Companies such as Google Inc. and librarians at esteemed institutions such as Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, for example, are hastily scanning books by the thousands and turning them into bits. Along with media of all varieties, these digitized books will be sewn together into a universal library of knowledge and human culture.
When the new virtual library of Alexandria comes to fruition it will provide a shared foundation for collaboration, learning, and innovation that will make the present Internet look like a second-hand bookshop.
Digital libraries, and the Herculean efforts to build them, are impressive and important. However, they are only one aspect of a much deeper transformation in science and invention.
As mass collaboration takes root in the scientific community, smart companies have an opportunity to completely rethink how they do science, and even how they compete. For example, our research shows that companies can dramatically scale and speed up their early-stage research-and-development activities by collaborating with scientific communities to aggregate and analyze pre-competitive knowledge in the public domain.
Starting in 1999, more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies did just that -- they abandoned their proprietary human genome projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signalling.
Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases.
A shared research infrastructure, in turn, allows project participants to harness insights and resources from thousands of university researchers, and hundreds of company researchers, too.
These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology -- breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders.
Nobody gives up their potential patent rights over new end products, and by sharing some basic intellectual property the companies bring products to market more quickly.
The bottom line is that sharing is not playground etiquette; it's about growth, innovation, and profit. What's more, this logic of sharing applies in virtually every industry.
"Just as it's true that a rising tide lifts all boats," says Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, "we genuinely believe that radical sharing is a win-win for everyone. Expanding markets create new opportunities." Under the right conditions, the same could be said of most industries, whether automobiles or other consumer products.
Of course companies need to protect critical intellectual property. They should always protect their crown jewels, for example. But companies can't collaborate effectively if all of their IP is hidden. Contributing to the commons is not altruism; it's the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.
Now that's an idea the Greek Alexandrians would appreciate.
Don Tapscott is CEO of New Paradigm, a technology and business think tank, and the author of 10 books about information technology in business and society, including Paradigm Shift, Growing Up Digital.
Anthony D. Williams is an author and researcher with experience in the impact of new technologies on social and economic life. He is vice- president and executive editor at New Paradigm.
