Mesh Collaboration: Creating New Business Value in the Network of Everything

Mesh Collaboration: Creating new business value in the network of everything. Mesh Collaboration, a new book by Andy Mulholland and Nick Earle, helps companies understand how to thrive and grow in a fast moving, ultracompetitive, globalized world by telling the story of Jane Moneymaker, the CEO of the fictitious Vorpal, Inc. Mesh Collaboration continues the story started in Mashup Corporations. In that book, Moneymaker and her team grappled with mashups and service-oriented architecture and the nature of Vorpal's relationships with innovators, customers, suppliers, and with the IT department. Mashups allowed a new form of business model, focused on selling customized products to niche markets and using the power of viral marketing. In Mesh Collaboration we pick up the story as Moneymaker and her team face the challenges of scaling the new business model in the multi-cultural globalized world. General sales and administrative costs are soaring and it is unclear why. Using the technique of explanatory fiction, Mesh Collaboration shows how Moneymaker merges the new world of Long Tail niche business models with the mass-market enterprise business model. Part 2 addresses the way that Web 2.0 collaborative techniques can be expanded beyond the role they initially played in creating niche markets. Part 3 shows how smart services can transform traditional industrial businesses by focusing on Power Plus, Vorpal¿s larger sister company. Power Plus expands beyond commodity products that compete only on price to a new model focusing on delivering business value by providing the whole solution through collaborative innovation. The last part of the book provides analysis of key questions that arise in each scenario.

Earle is Hewlett-Packard's chief stategist for e-services.