It is astonishing how many historical/religious accounts relate to a stone tower. Not just any tower - but a tower built because of a collaboration of men and women. According to biblical accounts, this tower was built after Noah's crew of land-sick folk finally docked and well after the after-party. They built a tower so tall, it could almost tickle the toes of heaven! What happened next, is sort of unclear - like all parables are. But the tower was destroyed and all men and women were given different languages. The logic was simple - if you can't understand each other, you can't collaborate! If you can't collaborate - you can't really build very big parable-ic towers. Apparently, when the tower was destroyed, no one had yet dreamt up Google Translate!
This is as good a juncture as any to consider the European venture Plastic Logic which has developed a high-end e-reader meant for businesses to replace paper. While the company is based out of Cambridge, the marketing is done in Silicon Valley, the software is developed in India and the manufacturing is done out of Dresden and China (Refer this week's Economist for a great article on the state of European tech start-ups). This structure very simply allows the company to tap into the best specialties around the world and drastically reduce costs (accounting for inflation, the Egyptians almost definitely spent more money and time developing papyrus).
Mr. Tapscott and Mr. Williams talk about the rising importance of collaboration in their 2006 best-seller Wikinomics. On June 11th, I had the pleasure of attending Mr. Tapscott's presentation at the Toronto Mars Discovery Center about the September 2010 sequel MacroWikinomics.
The upcoming book seems to pick up perfectly where Wikinomics ends. Businesses have been amongst the first to embrace collaboration on a massive scale because it increases efficiency and reduces costs i.e. it creates massive and quantifiable value. That's how Plastic Logic is able to tap into a huge base of early-adopters in Silicon Valley, the technology expertise in India and the manufacturing efficiency and craftsmanship of Dresden and China.
MacroWikinomics argues that structures that govern our everyday lives will now need to embrace collaboration to create such value and the authors give great examples of how and where these trends are beginning to shape up.
Health-care, for example, is going to be a massive data set of information about you. You are going to change your role as a passive recipient of health-care and instead take an active role in creating your life and health package with your personal physician. If you were to, god forbid, contract an impossible disease, the best medicinal minds in the world can collaborate on finding you a cure. This is a world where types of diseases and medicinal expertise is dispersed by geography, high-costs and diagnostic-time - 3 dimensions that are set to considerably shorten.
Governments will begin to distribute more power to the people driving up accountability and down political agendas. Democracy is set to take a huge leap forward by engaging the previously disengaged youth from many nations (The Obama campaign being an excellent example of the change). This doesn't mean that the loudest voice wins - rather that minority voice also counts!
Structures will be re-written! To whet your appetite - here are the structures whose re-engineering the book chronicles : (1) Industrial Age Corporations (2) The Financial System (3) Newspaper (4) Government (5) Democracy (6) The state of global problem solving (7) Work (8) Media & Entertainment (9) The Energy Platform (10) Science (11) Health-care (12) Military (13) The Cities (14) Transportation (15) Food & Water
The internet and the evolving nature of collaboration provide a strong foundation for reaching new heights in all the aspects that are important today and in the future. But, the structures that we create must be able to hold weight. From the presentation, I get the impression that the MacroWikinomics provides an important framework for those towers to be built.
Net Change Week 2010 -The Provocation of Don Tapscott from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
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