One of the most interesting examples of how to organize and be innovative around innovation has come in the world of encyclopedias. If you think about how knowledge was accumulated before in the last 100 years, the primary means of doing this was through books.

So Encyclopedia Britannica emerged as a way to accumulate the knowledge of the entire world, put it in a book form and then sell it door to door. And they made lots of money this way.

Then, in the early '90s, Microsoft approached this marketplace by thinking of a multimedia application, and they said, "We don't need to sell $1,000 encyclopedias. We can sell a $100 CD with all this knowledge put together and make the experience quite more interactive."

That Microsoft Encarta experience basically killed the Britannica model and started the revolution in multimedia. But even the Encarta model from Microsoft was upended through Wikipedia. Wikipedia came in 2001 as a new way of thinking about how to actually organize the world's knowledge.

Now, if you think about yourself, when was the last time you used Wikipedia? Most people say last week or this week sometime. But if you think about when was the last time you used Microsoft Encarta, most people have stopped using Encarta as a way to access knowledge. And almost nobody today goes to a book, an encyclopedia like Britannica, to get the knowledge. So the revolution has been quite spectacular just in business models.

But what's even more interesting is how Wikipedia is organized. What they said to their followers and to their users was, anybody could participate —anybody could submit an article, anybody can edit an article, and we will not limit what the encyclopedia is defined as being.

In the space of 10 years since Wikipedia has been launched, it has become one of the top 10 most trafficked Web sites in the world. And it has more coverage and better quality than what Britannica puts out or what Encarta puts out. This has been a revolution in how to actually think about how you can get masses of people from around the world to participate with you and to solve this problem of how to build an encyclopedia.

Now, just think about how counterintuitive this is. Imagine somebody at Microsoft going to Bill Gates in 1999 and saying, "You know, I've got a great idea for you. We should open up Encarta completely, we should put it on the Web and let anybody else participate in this creation. And we don't need to hire any more editors and any more smart people to create the content. People will do it by themselves for free."

This would never have flown within Microsoft. You can imagine that person being completely driven out by this kind of thinking. But it's indeed this type of thinking that enabled Wikipedia to take hold and to basically eat Microsoft's lunch.