The bottom-up collaborative economy

I’ve just spotted a recent article in BusinessWeek called The Power of Us that provides a great overview of how mass collaboration is driving the economy. It refers to a number of examples I described in detail in Living Networks, such as Eli Lilly’s Innocentive, which enables companies to draw the best innovators globally into their internal R&D programs. As evidenced again by the references in the article, the success of James Suriowecki’s outstanding book The Wisdom of Crowds has played a powerful part in making people realize that collaboration – if correctly designed – is far more powerful than any other approach. The tools and business models that support that will be central to the next phase of the global economy.