The dispositions of the new generation of customers, empowered and connected through technologies and information, who some like to call ‘the Prosumers’, is yet to be a full blown ‘phenomenon’ but the signs of a new era in social consumption, production and co-creation are loud and clear. With the ubiquity of information access, and the emergence of the ‘choice’ or ‘niche’ economy, it is set to take on a formidable shape! The technology of ‘Peer to peer’ participation and the ‘Do-it-yourself’ culture is only going to enhance each other until the traditional definitions of value, transactions, exchange and production will go through a completely radical change. Alain Thys’ presentation from the ‘Future Lab’ captures this undertone in a remarkably stunning way!

Something very fundamental is going through a silent and profound change. It is how we estimate the value of an object, an intangible or tangible artifact and attach a price tag to it going by the rule of our monetary market system… and it is what we never thought we will sell, like the ‘moblog’ on my experience of using that expensive skin treatment lotion as a lubricant for my bike! Sounds strange? But these are slowly becoming a marketer’s valuable tool to get deep inside the potential consumer’s psyche. Some futurists read these as a significant sign:

…there were powerful, unrecognized interactions between the non-money, or “prosumer,” economy and the money economy of our world. Rather than ignoring these interactions, we need to understand that these two economies are, in fact, parts of a unified “wealth system” in which the two parts pass value back and forth. There are all these channels between what people do without money and what goes on inside the money economy. I think they are going to multiply as the money economy creates more and more technologies that people can use to do things for themselves. For example, if you’re of a certain age, you probably remember that when you wanted to get photos developed and printed, you took them to a drugstore, they sent them to Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., Kodak sent them back, and then you paid the drugstore, and took your prints home. Now you do all that in the palm of your hand, because you have the digital camera technology that makes that possible. As a result, the market for printing and developing film is disappearing. It is moving from the money economy into the non-money economy. See Alvin Toffler, the most powerful futurist’s interview on Strategy+Business here.

This just may be the beginning of what could be something like a tidal wave of redefining and re-evaluating transactions and value exchanges in areas ranging from ‘personal consumption’ to ‘business processes’ in the coming days. In a recently published article by Manyika, Roberts & Sprague in McKinsey Quarterly, Issue Dec ‘07, a few trends have been predicted that are set to transform the landscape of business, Technology and Information in the near future. These trends are quite in tune with the ‘Free-Lunch’ Economy that Alvin and Heidi Toffler have discussed in their new book "The Revolutionary Wealth",

• Distributing co-creation
• Using consumers as innovators
• Tapping into a world of talent
• Extracting more value from interactions
• Unbundling production from delivery
• Putting more science into management
• Making businesses from information

Read the article re-published on Cnet News here Yet some may question if this will really occur in a real market context that itself is based on a monetary system of wealth. I think that is a very valid concern. Additionally there have been strong criticism on the ‘prying’ of the businesses and corporations on their customers to get more strategic advantages and creating better niches by accessing private information from them. But this tectonic shift can not be stopped by any single market force. The ‘Participation economy’ has arrived. And it has something for everyone. While the companies will benefit in bringing in more credibility in the ‘development process’ by transferring decision controls to customers, suppliers and distributors, it will have access to a massive amount of information from the ecosystem that could in turn be used to spawn off many new offerings. Customers will become valuable stakeholders in the business ecosystems, they will find their own markets and channels to monetize their own casual web browsing habits. There will be many innovations in the lines of the famous time-sharing enterprise in the UK, the Timebank or the ‘Unofficial’ syndicate for exposing corporate scams and other legal settlements, the Wikileaks (the IP addresses are masked to fend off censorship). And not all these transactions will be measured in monetary wealth. Intangibles like ‘Social’ and ‘Network’ capital will be invested and divested in rapid and successive cycles. Assets will be utilized in unconventional ways and new opportunities will be brewed out of non-core investments and ambient resources… However one concern that overshadows this ‘value implosion’ is that it may remain limited only to the ‘enthusiast’ participants who are relatively more comfortable with technology enabled channels like blogs, wikis or extranets! If this ‘Social Co-creation’ really needs to be the next big wave, obviously the focus needs to be on the ‘Digitally Excluded’, particularly in the low tech developing region communities. Think of ways to coerce the most ‘non-connected’ into the realms of participation. Start considering the WOM (word of mouth) as the most natural ‘Social media’, ‘trivial journaling’ as an important message, ‘counseling’ or ‘help seeking’ - a critical tool! Deep immersion into the contexts & behaviors about ‘prosumption’ will hold the key.