Wladawsky-Berger writes about the big picture of the Internet and the rise of collaborative work … here he references a lecture he heard:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation

[In his lecture] Professor Benkler is essentially saying that collaborative innovation is a serious mode of economic production that has arisen because the Internet and related technologies and standards now permit large numbers of individuals to organize themselves for productive work, in a decentralized, non-market way. A similar argument has been made by Steven Weber, Professor of Political Sciences at UC Berkeley and Director of Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, in his writings, and in particular in his recently published book The Success of Open Source.

This is an excellent article… makes a lot of great points.

I think one thing, though, that a lot of “cross-corporate collaboration” thinking is missing is that so many corporations need the same thing just within their own walls — cross-silo collaboration. Most major American corporations are like collections of companies with a shared logo.