What if you discovered that instead of keeping your most valuable secrets buried in a vault the way to pro"t from them was to give them away to the world for free? Or that the most valuable resource of your company doesn't go down the lift at night - what if it's actually out there just waiting to be asked to participate?

That's the mental jujitsu asked here of the business reader by Tapscott and Williams, who tease out some real-world examples of how the internet is reshaping not just modes of communications but methods of production. If open-source software like Firefox or Apache or an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia could come into existence via mass collaboration, what else is possible?

Nor is it a question confined to ivorytower techies?

It must have seemed like lunacy when Canadian mining concern GoldCorp posted its geological research, the deepest secret of any mininng company, online and offered a $500,000 reward to anyone who could help find and extract gold that may or may not have been on GoldCorp's land. For that relative pittance the company got 70 responses that led to the discovery of Euro3.4Bn in gold on their land. But it required a revolution in thinking.