Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Companies can tap emerging global marketplaces to discover and develop new products and services faster and much more efficiently than they have in the past. We call these marketplaces Ideagoras, much like the bustling agoras that sprung up in the heart of ancient Athens. In those days, agoras were the center of politics and commerce for the burgeoning Athenian citizenry. Modern-day ideagoras make ideas, inventions, and scientific expertise around the planet accessible to innovation-hungry companies.

Science and technology now evolve at such a great speed that even the largest companies can no longer research all the disciplines that contribute to their products. Nor can they can control an end-to-end production process or seek to retain the most talented people inside their boundaries. Meanwhile, acquisitions, alliances, joint ventures, and selective outsourcing are simply too rigid, and not scalable enough, to drive growth and innovation at a level that will make companies truly competitive. Smart companies will treat the world as their R&D department and use ideagoras to seek out ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds on a global basis.

Let Others Profit

The online technology transfer marketplace yet2.com was founded in 1999 as a place where companies could post underutilized assets they were seeking to license externally. For Procter & Gamble the prospect of listing underutilized assets with yet2.com presented a potential windfall. The consumer products giant owns more than 27,000 U.S. patents. In the late 1990s P&G discovered it was spending $1.5 billion on R&D, but using less than 10 percent of the resulting patents in its own products.

The problem for P&G (and other companies) was that finding applications and buyers for these innovative technologies could be highly inefficient. In most cases, firms seeking to buy or sell new inventions and technologies would call up close associates. While patent searches aided the process of identifying desirable technologies, they typically produced more dead ends than leads.

Online exchanges promise to improve liquidity by expanding the universe of opportunities. They could also reduce search costs by easing the process of matching buyers and sellers. By visiting yet2.com, companies can browse a list of available technologies worth $10 billion. Yet2.com’s network of 500 clients has access to roughly 40 percent of the world’s R&D capacity.

P&G recently used yet2.com to identify a buyer for a transdermal drug-delivery technology. The system transfers large drug molecules like insulin through the skin, so that a person with diabetes could wear a patch much like those used to help people quit smoking. P&G built a prototype. Now a small company, Corium, that specializes in drug delivery systems, is set to launch the product, and the two companies are exploring further collaboration.