Direct Economy

I was at the LIFT 07 conference last week in Geneva and participated in the user/citizen centered society panel. I spoke about the direct economy, the elimination of intermediaries and the sucking in, willingly or not, of the customer into the production/value chain.  Besides putting the customer to work in assembling the final product (think IKEA furniture and even loading music on your ipod), it provides lower cost and more personalization. The new business models can be derived from a framework developed at ThinkStudio, along two dimensions: increasing knowledge (from data, information, categorization, process time, to logic), and increasing interactivity of the customer (from passive, self-service, do-it-yourself, co-design to co-creation). More on this here. What this entails is a transfer of know-how from the producers to the consumers.

So as we democratize innovation, and transfer all this know-how to users/customers, we are going to create a two speed society, between those who can handle the technology, and those who can't. The perverse effect being that those who can least afford to pay, will be charged more as they will need to purchase service/help along with the products. And so I raised the question about behavior and ethics on the web and in the direct economy, as we move towards direct everything. With no single recognized moral authority, I believe people need to talk about the desired behavior, and start the conversation now. Victoria Visser was at the conference and blogged about the issue. Link here.

Comments

[Yoshiko]

Dear Beth,

I'm visiting your blog for the first time, suggested by Vistoria. Your thoguhts are interesting and stimulating to me!

Please allow me to share with you Steven Job's essay, "Toughts on music" (6 Feb. 2007). You may know it already but in case ..
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

He arugues that we should get rid of Digital Rights Management (DRM). But how will musicians make money?

Yoshiko