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Wikinomics

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The Large Hadron rapYesterday

No longer to content to lay claim to being the world’s largest scientific collaboration, it seems CERN, which operates the Large Hadron Collider, is now flexing its viral marketing muscles. I had a good laugh at this and can barely wait to share it with my son in the morning.  

 

Creating a wikinomics-enabled baby gift (storybook)Yesterday

Last year I was blessed with the birth of my daughter (now 9 months old), and I wanted to come up with a special gift that both she, and her immediate family could enjoy for years. Given that I was working on some wikinomics-related research, I sat down to think about how I could put some of the principles into play to create a unique and interesting gift. What I came up with was a story book about the first two months of her life - and I thought I’d post the process here for others that might want to do the same. Here’s what I did - it’s fairly easy, and can be done at quite a reasonable cost.

Like a lot of new parents, I had a huge number of digital photographs of my daughter over the first two months of her life. While I was originally thinking of a simple picture book, I’ve always liked the look of sketch drawings - but I’m not really a great sketch artist. However, I stumbled upon a very cool site called befunky.com, where any photo can be turned into a sketch using the cartoonizer. I did about 40 of them, saved them to my hard drive, and I think the results were pretty impressive. Here’s an example of the output from my daughter’s first few minutes of life:

Will the spirit of Wikinomics survive in harsher times?January 6

Edge.org recently posted a collection of 151 thoughts from leading thinkers on the “game-changing scientific ideas or developments” they think will “change everything” within their lifetimes. Having co-authored a book about how mass collaboration will change everything I was particularly intrigued by their answers.

There are many good entries, but artist, composer and producer Brian Eno’s short piece really struck a cord, mostly because it made me question some of the fundamental assumptions underlying our assertion that mass collaboration is not just a new business model that harnesses openness and participation; it’s a fundamentally new model of human organization and a new way to orchestrate our collective ingenuity to address the growing number of global challenges that seem destined to entirely overwhelm our traditional institutions.

Eno’s premise is that the game-changing development is more of a feeling than an idea—a creeping and insidious feeling that the world is getting worse rather than better, that the Earth’s natural capital is being pillaged rather than replenished, that war is more fruitful than peace, that your neighbor is more likely your rival than your friend. In this new world, fear, secrecy and mistrust reign. They re

World needs new platform on which to build economies, markets and societiesJanuary 6

The World Economic Forum’s Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai late last year was a new, unique gathering of the world’s leaders from academia, business, government and society. The Summit’s purpose is to advance solutions to the most critical challenges facing humanity. The over-arching message that came from the many discussions: The world needs to examine the basic operating systems that drive its economies, markets and societies and aim for a “fundamental reboot” to establish a fresh platform based on renewed confidence and trust, and on sustainability, responsibility and ethical principles. As part of the proceeding delegates could record their thoughts on the most pressing issues of the day. I discussed why the Obama administration must embrace Government 2.0.

Is there a Paradox of Wikinomics?January 6

(note: you can see the original post here).

For the last few weeks I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Keynesian “Paradox of Thrift“, which has become particularly relevant in today’s turbulent economy. As everyone knows by now, one of the driving forces of the problems revealed in 2008 was that consumers took on too much debt. The natural anecdote for this is for consumers to stop borrowing, and start saving - but that’s where the paradox lies. If everyone does that, aggregate demand will fall, the economy crashes, and the savings rate falls further still (also noting that when one saves by putting money in bank, it has to become debt for someone else in order to earn interest). Thus, we have a problem.

So it’s a case where doing what looks like the right thing for the long-term success of the economy has some perilous implications - at least in the short-term. In turn, it got me thinking about whether there is a similar, and potentially much larger, “Paradox of Wikinomics” as well. What I mean by this is that while application of the wikinomics principles might appear to  be the right thing for many companies and industries acting in their own self-interest, everyone adopting them at once could have similarly dire consequences - again, at least in the short-term.

In order to explain, let’s start again (also us