We have a culture of control rather than a culture of enablement in our companies. We seek to manage risk by being opaque and by trying to have tight controls. [But] look at the economy: It's in the tank. If we had shared some of these risk models and had transparency and financial models that were shared, maybe a rising tide would have lifted all boats and we'd compete on a different level, but the economy wouldn't be a mess. All these principles go against the grain; they don't feel right to most of these executives. But US$9 million worth of research tells me these are the axes that successful 21st-century companies will be built with.
So, how can corporate executives work through the issues that you just cited?
With the new edition of Wikinomics, we added two chapters at the end on what you need to do to move forward. One of the things we do at New Paradigm is offer a wiki workshop. This is the use of wikis, blogs, social networks, tags, RSS, etc., within the boundaries of a company. You've got 80 million young people coming into the workforce, and they as high school and university students have at their fingertips more powerful communications tools than exist in corporate America. They're itching to go. Why not stick your saddle on that horse instead of pounding your head against the wall with someone who thinks that Facebook should be banned by a company. It's bizarre - companies are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing. It's reminiscent of companies banning IM five years ago.
How is mass collaboration playing out in the pharmaceutical industry, where competition among the heavyweight companies to launch new drugs is so fierce?
It's a great case in point. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance among pharmaceutical executives these days. In the biotechnology industry, there's the Human Genome Project, where everyone is placing [intellectual property] in the commons so that a rising tide will lift all boats. But in pharma, they have this huge struggle with IP, with generic drugs and knock-offs. It's a real yin-yang [scenario] that's going on. The pharmaceutical industry, by outsourcing drug trials, is moving forward with sharing IP. But they haven't taken the next step for mass collaboration. If you reach Stage IV in a drug trial, what a great opportunity to use the Web to see what's going on.
Deep down, I can't believe that executives would be so thoughtless and cynical about sharing information. Why not have a different model so that instead of doing all this R&D yourselves and producing a drug and using broadcast media to push it out into the market, you apply collaboration throughout the entire process? You can share IP with your competitors, and ultimately you tap into "ideagoras" [i.e., a marketplace of ideas]. It's a great example of an industry that can reinvent itself using this model.
But for companies that do embrace the notion of mass collaboration, what steps do they need to take to protect their own intellectual property?
For every company, the starting point shouldn't be, "How do we protect our IP?" The starting point should be, "How do we innovate?" IBM doesn't expect to own its primary operating system, which now is Linux. Every one of us has a mutual fund that includes a portfolio of stocks: high tech, US, Asian, etc. Every company needs a portfolio of intellectual property - some that it protects, some that it shares within its business Web and some that it places in the commons, like the biotech companies did around the Human Genome Project.
If you approach it as protecting your IP from the beginning, you'll end up like the record industry and have your business obliterated. The industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles is now suing its customers and collapsing.