Why innovation through collaboration is a key economic driver

BOOK REVIEW: IF I had to sum up Charlie Leadbeater's We-Think, it made me conclude that the old must coexist with the new. New web technologies can help build a better, richer, even more democratic world, but they don't replace - instead they rather complement - human interaction as we know it.

We -Think: Mass Innovation Not Mass Production

By Charles Leadbeater; Profile Books; £12.99 (€16.50)

Refreshingly, Leadbeater does not approach the web revolution with the "told you so" tone of some "Web 2.0" books. Instead, he soothingly outlines the pros and cons of the hyper-connectivity that the web has brought to bear on our increasingly "smaller" world. His experience as a management consultant, tempered with an accomplished background in journalism and politics, brings a perspective that is both informative and provocative at the same time.

We live in an increasingly connected world. Thoughts are twittered. Ideas blogged. It took 20 years to get to one billion mobile phones, four years to get to two billion and three years to get to three billion handsets. Technology races to keep up with people's insatiable thirst for knowledge and information.

In this more connected world, Leadbeater pitches the theme of mass collaboration as a way to make the world more democratic, even prosperous. The web is viewed as a great leveller, where anyone can be a director, writer or creator of value, but even more importantly, can openly share information and knowledge.

"This book is a defence of sharing, particularly the sharing of ideas. The web matters because it allows more people to share ideas with more people in more ways," he says.

Indeed, Leadbeater eats his own dogfood. This is not an academic tome, but a living, breathing document.

To validate his "mass collaboration" theme, Leadbeater put the first three chapters of his book online in late 2006, seeking comment and engagement from anyone in cyberspace.

Many thought he was mad. But instead of giving away his intellectual property for free, he received hugely valuable comments and ideas, which led him to acknowledge the book as having been authored by "Charles Leadbeater and 257 other people". He cleverly built a movement of interested people - collaborators - who were, if anything, even more interested in buying his book on completion and no doubt keen to recommend it to their own "networks".

Using highly relevant examples throughout, Leadbeater gives us a sense of how new technologies can rapidly and cheaply scale knowledge and information.

He cites Wikipedia and how, despite having just five employees in 2007, it reached hundreds of millions of people globally in over 100 languages. Leadbeater also believes that the advent of the web "offers significant opportunities to improve how we work, consume and innovate".

Hierarchies are replaced with meritocracies. When Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the source code for his creation in the 1990s, little did he know that through mass collaboration and improvements by others, it would end up running on over 80 per cent of computer servers around the world by 2006.

Leadbeater hints that the industrial era was one that caused many companies to focus solely on process and manufacturing improvements, forgetting somewhat about "people".

He argues that innovation, traditionally believed to be conducted by people in white coats in laboratories, can instead come from anywhere in the organisation.

Taking the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries as examples, he shows how they have radically changed to focus on innovation through collaboration - shared costs and shared spoils lead to a win-win situation rather than working in isolation and placing a bet on just one horse in the race.

Focus on mass innovation, not mass production, says Leadbeater, adding that the impact of mass collaboration could eventually account for 15 to 20 per cent of the UK and US economies. An interesting thought as this country looks for economic drivers over the next few years and begs the question: Why not Ireland, too?

John Herlihy is Google vice-president for online sales and operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa