Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017 - 25

BO O K R E V I E W: M AC H I N E , P L AT F O R M , C ROW D

the crowd, innovators
found different ways to detect and harvest this
knowledge," such as prediction
markets
and
modern search engines,
they state (pg. 237). The
crowd is becoming increasingly more valuable in
contributing to problem
solving, and the authors
cite examples of medical
researchers posting questions on large platforms to
advance their projects. The
results? In many cases, the
crowd is outperforming
MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson, principal research scientist at MIT, and Andrew McAfee,
R&D labs, engineering
director of the MIT initiative on the Digital Economy. Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva.
departments, and scientific
"But does that mean that ... medical misdiagnosis rates
researchers. Crowd-based start ups also are evolving to
should be higher than they could be, just to let doctors
challenge incumbent companies, providing even greater
and psychologists keep doing their usual work?"
competitive incentive for established players to think and
work collaboratively.
Part 2 on the "Platform" provides a fascinating history
of platforms' impact on cost structures, supply and demand, and evolving competitors-from media to music
to urban transportation, and so on. The book provides
significant background on industries that struggled to
implement and those that failed to adapt and became
marginalized. The reader learns about Craigslist,
WhatsApp, iTunes, Amazon Web Services, and many
others that used the evolving Internet and emerging IoT
to tip the scale to their advantage. "Most traditional
goods and services are not free, perfect, or instant, putting them at a competitive disadvantage," they observe
(pg. 149). "Combinatorial innovation can be fast and
cheap, and when it's leveraged by the power of the free,
perfect, and instant characteristics of platforms, the results are often transformative" (pg. 138). In sum,
collaboration is becoming increasingly essential to
compete, and the reader is provided with economic insights, figures, and graphs to prepare for the next
technological generation.
Part 3, the "Crowd," discusses the increasing demand for
certain services stemming from a platform driven by millions of people using the "deliberately decentralized and
uncontrolled" Web. "As groups went online, and became

Each chapter includes a quick summary of main points
as well as questions that can be used collectively with a
team. Machine, Platform, Crowd seems to be a clear
choice for the alliance managers' must-read book list.
And it's reassuring for this writer to know that, according to the authors, we're a long way away from AI
being able to generate such a thoughtful tome. n
Cynthia B. Hanson is managing editor of ASAP Media and
Strategic Alliance Magazine, and the former Books Editor at
The Christian Science Monitor newspaper.
* See the June 2017 eSAM Plus article by Norma
Watenpaugh, CSAP, "Managing the Digital Experience,"
along with ASAP Media's in-depth blog coverage of the June
6, 2017 ASAP Tech Partner Forum, for frequent references
to partnering in the context of the topics discussed in
Machine, Platform, Crowd. Two recent Strategic Alliance
Magazine articles connect the digital transformation dots to
alliance practice in the ecosystem: "The Partner-Everywhere
Imperative: A Practitioner's Guide," by Jan Twombly, CSAP,
Jeff Shuman, CSAP, PhD, and Lorin Coles, CSAP, Q1 2017
Strategic Alliance Magazine, and by the same authors,
"Partnering for the Connected Ecosystems of the Fourth
Industrial Revolution," in the Summer (Q3) 2016 issue.
Q3 * 2017 | STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017