The Reciprocity Advantage summary

Right now, all over the world communal areas where people come together to share resources and knowledge are popping up like mushrooms. These maker spaces have proved to be powerful engines for both collaboration and innovation. Companies certainly have a lot to learn from them.

Maker spaces show that sometimes, the point isn’t necessarily to create profitable products. Rather, we gain far more by attempting to build and learn together.

Today, the internet allows us to scale a company in ways that would have seemed pure fantasy just 20 years ago. If you’re willing to share and co-create with others, there is no limit to how much you can grow.

Sharing speeds up your growth without hurting your core business. A case in point is TED and TEDx. When architect Richard Wurman created TED in 1984, it was intended to be the world’s most elite conference.

You may have heard the term digital natives being thrown around in reference to people who were 18 years old or younger in 2014. This isn’t just some new buzzword – digital natives have radically different attitudes toward companies, and the way they interact with them is bound to create change. They are the key to creating partnerships for the future.

Digital natives are bound to disrupt traditional methods for companies to make money. How? A good example can be found in intellectual property. The generation currently growing up will be diametrically opposed to intellectual property rights, and the companies trying to make money by selling them. So what should a company do if it wants to survive? Instead of seeking to protect their intellectual property, it’s time to explore what can be gained by sharing it.

Instead of having an innovation department of ten people brainstorming in a stuffy conference room, why not have 10,000 people brainstorming for you? Having access to a global community of connected users won’t just affect how and when we work. It will change the very way companies innovate.

Companies today feature employees that perform certain jobs. This is all starting to change. In the future, jobs will be broken down and distributed online. Take Task Rabbit, for example.

If you think games are just entertainment, think again! They can be much more – like simulations of the future or a means to bond with others. An ever-growing number of companies around the globe are discovering how to use gaming to their advantage.

Games are a proven way to engage more genuinely with customers. Economist Edward Castronova has studied players of large online games to try and grasp exactly why it is that people play. If you’d have guessed escapism, competition or entertainment, you’d better guess again.

Just as the railroads opened up a whole new world of commerce in the 1800s, the cloud will open up major new possibilities for reaching more customers and scaling your business. In fact, the cloud is the infrastructure of the future. And we’ve only seen the beginning.

From what we’ve seen so far, it’s clear that cloud computing will speed up innovation to an astonishing rate. Cloud computing will function as a medium for those shared assets, or commons, that we can all benefit from. Not only will cloud computing make it easier to increase the commons, but also for us to access and make use of them.