The book by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams describes Wikinomics as the "new art and science of collaboration". Actually, it actually has strong echoes of CK Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy's excellent 2004 book The Future of Competition .

Still, they manage to build a compelling argument around the notion that companies will, instead of relying on limited internal resources to innovate, turn to mass collaboration and open-source technology such as wikis. The word 'wiki', from the Hawaiian for 'quick', refers to software that allows users to edit content on the internet. The most obvious example is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, a site that attracts more vistors than Amazon or eBay, partly because it's very often the first hit in a Google search and partly because it's always good to find stuff there, even if it's maybe not that well written. But then, with Wikipedia's typos and moments of clumsiness are good too because they remind you that this enormous encyclopaedia is not a commercial venture.

Tapscott and Williams point to seven trends to watch:

Peer pioneers which describes the kind of people who introduced innovations like Linux and Wikipedia.
Ideogoras describing emerging marketplaces for ideas and inventions. Companies like Procter & Gamble use these innovations to each out beyond the corporate walls and invite outsiders to solve challenges or they adapt ideas generated by other companies.
Prosumers or the new generation of consumers trying to improve the products they use and who consider they have a right to hack. Similarly, there are now companies like Lego that work with those customers and invite changes can increase the value of their offerings.
The new Alexandrians where there is a new science of sharing that brings in breakthrough technologies and that seeks to make the world a better place with scientists moving their publications online with instant peer review rather than the traditional slow publication cycle of journals, with best-practice techniques and materials being speedily diffused through the Internet as they become known and, scientists from around the world collaborating on major issues, such as global warming, through online channels.
Platforms for participation where companies open their products and technology infrastructures to allow other firms to use them as a platform to create new offerings and even new businesses, knowing that will inevitably strengthen their own position. One example is the BBC which invites third parties to create prototype services built around BBC content feeds, thus turning the BBC from a media company into a content provider. Another example is Google which allows third parties to take its maps and use them in a variety of business scenarios.
The global plant floor where companies with open and porous boundaries compete by reaching outside their corporate walls and harness external knowledge and capabilities. Examples include BMW, which focuses on marketing, partnering and customer relationships. While maintaining the engineering expertise it deems critical, its suppliers make most of the components and increasingly assemble the final vehicle.
The Wiki workplace where there is mass collaboration going on within the organization, allowing workers to be more self-organized and independent. Examples include Google drawing its product ideas from the 20 per cent of the time allocated to employees to work on their own projects, and the internal prediction markets of companies like Siemens, Eli Lilly, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

The ideas are good although the authors are a bit too optimistic when they claim this is the shape of things to come. Most organizations are not porous and most will remain hierarchical. The trouble is, people and systems don't change easily, something management theory has never been particularly good at addressing. Their vision of Utopia challenges just about every way managers work. It means for example that the roles of customers and competing firms are less clearly defined, that accounting rules based on what a company "owns" are challenged with more businesses using more resources than they actually have and it means that competing interests will have to work out how much to share. It won't be easy.

Still, these changes are reshaping business today. What it means is that competition will not be any less brutal. It's just going to be a lot messier.