A 16th C. collector of proverbs named John Heywood wrote down this one:  Two heads are better than one. Now, in the 21st C., thanks to the Web, we can say: A million (10 million?) heads are better than one.  

A new book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams,  Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, emerged from a $9 million research project, showing how the Internet enables masses of people to participate in the innovation economy through social networking. In fact, social networking may be a far more powerful innovation than nanotechnology or WiFi.   

The name Wikinomics comes from Wikipedia (pronounced: weekie-peedia), the on-line user-written encyclopedia. Wikipedia, in turn, comes from the Hawaiian word for speed, wiki wiki, also  the name of the fast shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport. The name was used by Ward Cunningham for the first wiki site, in 1995, devoted to solutions to recurring problems found in computer programming. Larry Singer built Nupedia, in 2001, the first open-content peer-reviewed free encyclopedia; Wikipedia was created for writers contributing content to Nupedia. Sanger was astonished at the explosion of Wikipedia content and the number of users. 

How can businesses leverage this remarkable innovation? Writing in the latest issue of Forbes, Rich Karlgaard discusses the user network created by Cirrus, a maker of low-cost airplanes. Cirrus owners are dedicated fans of the product – so much so, they initiated an Internet message board, and began posting complaints.

Dedicated fans? Complaints? What Cirrus understood, and what many companies fail to understand, is that only users who truly care about the product take the trouble to post complaints – and  such postings are worth their weight in gold, providing data and information not available otherwise. COPA (Cirrus Owners & Pilots Association) members have launched, according to Karlgaard, a COPApedia, user-generated Cirrus encyclopedia modeled after Wikipedia. Cirrus gains invaluable information from it, for R&D, and it costs them nothing. “It learns about future wants, price points and likely sales volume”, notes Karlgaard. All Cirrus has to do is tune in and listen – and not fight back.

There is a major lesson here. Innovative companies can acquire great innovations from their own versions of COPApedia – provided they have the vision and patience to join them, rather than fight them.  

And, as Heywood said nearly 500 years ago: Better to bow than to break. Better to bow to the wisdom of thousands of users, than break their wisdom by battling it.