Check out this Harvard Business Review interview with Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

The main premise is that if intellectual property owners resist hoarding knowledge and, instead, share it openly, the return will be much greater. Good examples illustrate the four factors that are driving the social web and, ultimately, a business environment of greater openness, collaboration and efficiency. Those factors:

The New Web: Web 1.0 (based on HTML) was a publishing platform. Web 2.0 (based on XML) is a collaboration platform – platform for self-organization

Demographic Revolution: Kids of baby-boomers are bathed in bits… they think and act differently.

Social Revolution: Put these two factors together and the result is a social revolution.

Economic Revolution: These three factors combine to create an unprecedented economic revolution of efficiencies of cost and knowledge transfer.

Old Model: Think globally / act locally.

New model: Think locally / act globally.

The podcast can be found at the HBR podcast page. Listen here (MP3)