This also matches up with the trend toward people making products to solve problems in their own communities. Businesses are moving away from producing for the masses, and toward more local, niche markets.
The culture of open-source software – which permits users free use of code under specific conditions – is another death knell for the big-business-protecting patent system. (Not that this will be a quick death.)
Current digital-fabrication technologies are at the state of one of the first fully assembled personal computer circuit boards, the Apple I, developed in 1976, estimates David ten Have. If true, this means that 3D printing, open-source hardware, and other digital-fabrication technologies will have a massive impact on our economy.
CONNECTIVITY
Internet, mobile devices, laptops, tablets; PDAs, GPS, 3G, 4G, IM, SMS, GPS; LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – you get the picture. We’re plugged in and connected, and, as some like to say, hyper-ly so.
Venture capitalist Mike Maples Jr. says:
You’re going to have billions of nodes connected to millions of clouds and you’re not going to think of it as one Internet anymore, but you’re going to have all kinds of different clouds and data feeds and screens and interfaces that don’t even have screens talking to each other, sometimes overtly and sometimes behind the scenes.8
Today, technology innovation is finally about the individual product user. Disintermediation, or the removal of the middleman that sometimes lives between problem and solution, has disrupted multiple industries, putting creative people in direct contact with consumers. For instance, musicians can sell directly to their fans, authors to their readers, and filmmakers to their viewers. While large entertainment studios, for instance, once dominated their respective industries by curating content producers and owning distribution channels, the Internet has brought democracy to these endeavors, increasing competition, driving down prices, and increasing consumer choice. The days of cable companies forcing consumers to buy schlocky reality shows to get the content they truly want are coming to an end.
THE VALUE-CREATION ECONOMY
We are in a value-creation economy. The businesses that continuously create the most value within a market win. This is true for big, established businesses, as well as startups.
There are two sides to the coin when it comes to value-creation. On one side is customer empowerment, and on the other is employee empowerment.
The nature of being hyperconnected means businesses can have access to their customers 24/7, no matter where they live. This has an important implication, which is that it’s easier than ever to be attuned to your customers, and that means businesses are in an excellent position to truly understand their consumers.
In the value-creation economy, customers are empowered by:
● Having a product experience that exceeds their needs.
● Having a relationship with the company in which the company treats them respectfully.
● Having a voice in the product.
With power in the hands of the consumer, the value-creation economy is defined by eliminating barriers between those who build a product and those who experience it. To accomplish this, employees must be empowered to:
● Be close to the customer.
● Discover new value.
● Create value in the moment.
Rather than being sequestered inside office buildings and leaving customer interaction solely to salespeople and customer support, all employees should seek to deeply understand their customers. It should become standard practice for anyone engaging with a customer to be in a learning mode. Software engineers need to go to the source and understand the context of the problem for which they’re engineering a solution. Customer service should be empathetic. Salespeople should be consultative. Even personnel in back-office support functions like human resources, legal and compliance, and information technology should seek to deeply understand the needs of their customers, who happen to be colleagues at their place of work.
This is even true for doctors!
Good physicians know that understanding their patients deeply helps them diagnose illnesses. Family history, nutrition, exercise, stress, and other daily routines and quality-of-life conditions have an important impact on health. That being said, specialists can lose sight of the impact that medical procedures and pharmaceuticals might have on quality of life and other factors that impact long-term health. So relying solely on the science of disease, medicine, and cures, it’s possible to lose focus on the idea that analyzing the quality of life shouldn’t be separate from the discussion about life itself.
Dr. Stephanie Cooper,9 cardiologist and assistant professor at the University of Washington, says:
In the past, a doctor may begin interaction with a patient with an open-ended question, but research has shown that doctors often interrupt the response. The ensuing discussion is directed and manipulated by the physician, who often has preconceived notions about what the patient needs. Patients leave without having all of their questions answered, often feeling disrespected and not fully understanding the treatment plan. This leads to decreased compliance and, in the worse situations, to increased likelihood of litigation if things go wrong. It may also result in worse outcomes.
In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on patient involvement in medical decision making in which all the possible treatment options and outcomes are outlined and the patient and doctor together make a decision based on patient preferences. This is in direct contradistinction to physicians’ patriarchal, autonomous decision making (telling the patient what treatment comes next) but also is not an open-ended choice given to the patient, who cannot possibly understand all of the consequences of treatment options without guidance from their medical provider.
This is patient empowerment.
CASE STUDY: Customized Value Creation
Scott Summit, cofounder of Bespoke Innovations, revolutionized the world of prosthetic limbs by combining excellent design with digital fabrication techniques. Here’s his story.
I set out thinking, “Where can you create things that (1) are very complex and (2) will be meaningful in changing the quality of somebody’s life?”
As it happens, I was always interested in prosthetic limbs. I saw an opportunity waiting to happen or a solution that is waiting to happen because existing products represent an unsatisfied need. Regular prosthetics are an engineering solution to a problem and not a design solution.
I thought, “Okay, here is an opportunity to fix that. Maybe I can combine 3D printing, which is the ability to make a unique thing for a unique situation, and prosthetic limbs, which are not very well suited for mass production since that makes generic the complexity and nuance of human individuality.”
So that became the foundation for Bespoke. We started with prosthetic limbs and that’s still what we do as kind of the flagship, but now we have a number of other opportunities that follow a similar mentality.
Ultimately, we want to show as much respect for an individual as we possibly can. We use technology tools and the design tools as our vehicle. I think it shows people tremendous disrespect to lump them all into the same category and say, “Okay, you’re all amputees – you all get this part, this collection of titanium machined parts because you’re all that similar.”
So we rethink that and say, “How do we speak to a person’s individuality and their taste and their uniqueness?”
The process we take is multifaceted. There’s the “get to know us” process, where we explain to [clients] what we do. We attempt to elicit from them their tastes and preferences in design aesthetic, and that’s actually very difficult to do, harder than