Researchers Don Tapscott, head of the management consultancy New Paradigm, along with colleague Anthony D. Williams, leveraged $9 million in research to answer these questions with Wikinomics, a book whose focus is as broad and ambitious as Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. Just as Friedman made compelling arguments for a flattening of the business world marked by the globalization of marketing, production and delivery of everything from iPods to executive assistance, Tapscott and Williams establish the influence of collaboration on an unprecedented scale in the development of everything from aircraft design to encyclopedias to open source software.

Wikinomics is built around four central ideas: openness, peering, sharing and acting globally. These ideas are woven throughout the book in the context of economic theory, American history, boardrooms and newsrooms. Some of the book’s concepts aren’t entirely new—many of us collaborate all the time with colleagues, customers and partners on materials like PowerPoint presentations, press releases, business plans, and the like. But Wikinomics does introduce some bold new concepts. According to the authors, Web sites have become passé. They argue that in order to thrive, communicators must instead build thriving online communities. The merits of new media platforms such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, chat rooms, podcasting and more are discussed at length. “Peer production”—harnessing the creative energy of massive amounts of people—is emphasized as the key to an ever-evolving communications revolution.

The authors meticulously document how Google, MySpace, Second Life and YouTube have changed the way we communicate and collaborate in both professional and personal settings. The stories of “The Peer Pioneers” are fascinating, most notably the story of Wikipedia’s five-year evolution from a pet project to a resource used by more than a third of online Americans. The discussion of “Prosumers” and the “democratization of media” shed light on the ways that consumers of news are changing the way that news is reported, sometimes to the extent that we are creating it ourselves.

The final chapter consists of one sentence inviting the reader to “edit this book!” by visiting a wiki called the Wikinomics Playbook. It includes real-time updates reflecting new communication media that have emerged since the book was published, as well as other insights offered by dozens of contributors worldwide. In addition, readers are invited to edit the online version of the book itself.

In the end, that’s what makes slogging through Wikinomics’ drier portions worthwhile. Armed with the authors’ understanding of how wikinomics is changing the world of collaboration, we ourselves are left to collaborate with them.