Economies of Cooperation

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If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds — and at far lower cost, with far less risk.

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This is what BusinessWeek writes in a long and well documented essay entitled “The Power of Us” that will be part of its next print issue, dated June 20th.

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At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves — designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters.

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It is a number of new technologies, that have appeared only in the last few years, that has given fuel to this increasing cooperation.