As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog entry, I’ve gotten my hands on a new book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, entitled Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything. I offered a commentary on the Introduction in yesterday’s blog; today, I’ll focus on Chapter One. At this rate, it may take several weeks or months for me to finish reading the book and commenting on it; in the meantime, you’re more than welcome to get your own copy, as well as browsing through Anthony Williams’ blog.

Chapter One opens with a summary of an unusual collaborative exercise that took place a few years ago at a small Toronto-based gold-mining firm called Goldcorp, Inc. Faced with debts, strikes, and high production costs, the company was struggling to survive with a 50-year-old mine in Red Lake, Ontario that financial analysts assumed was running out of useful deposits. In a last-ditch effort, the CEO sent a team of geologists out to conduct exploratory drilling in the deepest and most remote parts of the mine. The test results were highly encouraging, but the geologists were having trouble assessing the drilling data to produce an accurate estimate of the gold’s value and exact location.

Frustrated, the CEO (Rob McEwen) decided to try something radical: he made all of the company’s mining data public, dating back to 1948, and asked the Internet community where they could expect to find the next six million ounces of gold. A so-called “Goldcorp Challenge” was launched, with a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants with the best methods and estimates. Four hundred megabytes of geological data about the company’s 55,000-acre property was uploaded to Goldcorp’s Web site, and over a thousand “virtual prospectors” from fifty countries began crunching the data. Ultimately, the contestants identified 110 targets on the Red Lake property, 50 percent of which had not been previously been identified by the company; 80 percent of the new targets yielded substantial quantities of gold — totaling eight million ounces of gold.

Arguably, nobody could have predicted the results — especially considering that all of this took place in March of 2000, long before the advent of Wikipedia or the creation of the Web 2.0 buzzword. As CEO McEwen acknowledged, “We were attacking a fundamental assumption; you simply don’t give away proprietary data … It’s so fundamental that no one had ever questioned it.”

Okay, so it’s a great story, and it serves as a poster child for this chapter of the Wikinomics book, if not the entire book. Co-author Don Tapscott used it to highlight his presentation at November’s Web 2.0 Summit conference, and the entire audience was clearly impressed (I stood on a chair in the middle of the hotel ballroom and personally observed the facial expression of every member of the audience). If you ask Google to find pages relevant to the terms “Goldcorp collaboration wiki,” you’ll find links to roughly a dozen blog postings that summarize the Goldcorp story in more or less the same way. However, in my role as a wiki/Web 2.0 advocate concerned about over-hyping, let me offer a few observations and questions:

• The fact that all of this took place in March, 2000 means that it probably didn’t involve any of the technology that everyone seems to associate with today’s Web 2.0 world. I have no idea what kind of servers or network connections the Goldcorp data center had at the time; but I’d be willing to bet that only a small percentage of the contributors (who consisted not only of geologists, but also graduate students, consultants, mathematicians and military officers(!)) had high-speed, broadband Internet connections. Downloading a 440-megabyte database must have been a real pain; and such current technologies as AJAX, Ruby, and Django weren’t part of the solution. The inventor of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, had installed the WikiWikiWeb in 1995, but Wikipedia didn’t exist in March, 2000 — nor were there any of the Wiki-based tools (e.g., twiki, mediawiki, pbwiki, jotspot, etc.) that are so widely available today. Conclusion: advanced technology is not the critical success factor for widespread, Internet-based collaboration. What inspired Goldcorp CEO Rob McEwen was not Wikipedia, but (according to co-authors Tapscott and Williams) the emerging success of Linux, and the open-source collaboration model championed by Linus Torvalds.
• The fact that the case study took place in March, 2000 means … what? No other impressive examples have occurred since then? Well, actually, there are some; they include such conservative industries as pharmaceuticals, and they’re discussed in subsequent chapters of the Wikinomics book. But the fact that the first, and most prominent, case study for the wikinomics concept is now almost seven years old says to me that we’re not looking at an overnight revolution that has spread throughout the entire civilized world.
• The circumstances leading up to the “Goldcorp challenge” are important: I have no personal knowledge of the events, but Tapscott and Williams tell us that “Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, the mine seemed destined for closure, and Goldcorp was likely to go down with it.” Had Goldcorp been doing well, or had it merely been facing a modest downturn, it’s unlikely that anyone would have suggested the radical collaboration concept. And if anyone was crazy enough to suggest it, it would have been vetoed by the traditional culture that had run the company in the past. This is a common phenomenon, of course: only when a company has its back to the wall, and is threatened with bankruptcy or extinction, will it try anything radically new. And that means your company may well reject a similar approach unless it’s faced with similar dire circumstances.
• Even when a company knows that it’s faced with dire circumstances, a traditional CEO may be simply incapable — intellectually, technologically, psychologically, politically, or culturally — of carrying out the radical approach that can save the day. Tapscott and Williams tell us that Rob McEwen, Goldcorp’s CEO, “had no real experience in the extractive industries, let alone in gold mining. Nevertheless, as an adventurous young mutual fund manager he had gotten involved in a takeover battle and emerged as Goldcorp Inc.’s majority owner. Few people … had much confidence that McEwen was the right person to rescue the company. But McEwen just shrugged off his critics.” Well, that’s great … and apparently they all lived happily ever after. But those of us working for a company whose CEO (and/or whose Board of Directors) has risen up through the ranks, and who has spent his or her entire adult life following traditional practices and strategies may not be able to adapt to a wiki-style collaboration approach.

None of this is intended to throw cold water on the notion of large-scale collaboration; I just want us to beware getting carried away by such statements as this one, which shows up a few pages into Chapter One of Wikinomics:

“A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated — cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value.”

I think that when we look back on today’s business environment 20 years from now, this statement will definitely be true — for most companies in most industries. Perhaps it will be largely accurate 10 years from now. Maybe even five years from now. But it will only be partially true in 2007 and 2008. Of course, that in itself is exciting, for it offers some tremendous opportunities for the “early adopters” who begin exploiting the “new collaboration” before their competitors do, and before Wall Street has accurately figured out to assess the value of such collaboration.

The remainder of this chapter discusses the “new art and science of wikinomics [which] is based on four powerful new ideas: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.” Well, I’m not sure how “new” these ideas are, though the combination of all four, supported and reinforced by the global Internet community, is indeed “powerful.” The discussion of these four ideas is interesting, and well worth reading; but I didn’t see anything that required any special commentary on my part.

The final paragraphs of Chapter One give us a preview of what’s to come in the remainder of the book: “a tour of the collaboration economy, including seven new models of mass collaboration that are successfully challenging traditional business design.” These include:

• The “peer pioneers” — the people who brought us open-source software and Wikipedia…
• “Ideagoras” — an emerging marketplace that enables companies like Proctor & Gamble to tap global pools of highly skilled talent.
• “Prosumers” — “the increasingly dynamic world of customer innovation, where a new generation of producer consumers considers the ‘right to hack’ its birthright.”
• “New Alexandrians” — a new science of sharing that will “rapidly accelerate human health, turn the tide of environmental damage, advance human culture, develop breakthrough technologies, and even discover the universe.” I’m told that Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk are coming along, together with the entire crew of the Starship Enterprise.
• “Platforms for Participation” — in which “companies open up their products and technology infrastructures … so that large communities of partners can create value, and in many cases, create new businesses.” If you’re familiar with mashups, you get the idea.
• “Global Plant Floor” — “planetary ecosystems for designing and building physical goods, marking a new phase in the evolution of mass collaboration.”
• “Wiki Workplace” — “how mass collaboration is taking roots in the workplace and creating a new meritocracy…”

As time permits, I’ll read and comment on the chapters of Wikinomics that expand on these seven “models” of the large-scale collaboration concept.