Korn Kim - Infinite possibility: creating customer value on the digital frontier

infinite
POSSIBILITY

OTHER BOOKS BY B. JOSEPH PINE II

The Experience Economy, Updated Edition

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore

Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want

James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II

Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization

James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, editors

The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore

Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition

B. Joseph Pine II

CREATING CUSTOMER VALUE
ON THE DIGITAL FRONTIER

B. Joseph Pine II
Kim C. Korn

Infinite Possibility

Copyright 2011 by B. Joseph Pine II and Kim C. Korn
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First Edition
Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-60509-563-9
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-60509-564-6
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-60509-962-0

2011-1

BOOK PRODUCED BY: Westchester Book Group
COVER DESIGN: Mark van Bronkhorst, MvB Design
COPYEDITOR: Rick Camp
INDEXER: Robert Swanson

To Stan Davis, who inspired this book, and to my wife, Julie, who inspires me.

Joe Pine

To my wife, Annie, for her good humor and tireless support, and to Joe for his trust.

Kim Korn

September 1, 2010. On my guestroom doorsill at the Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek. The USA Today cover story: Stadium vs. Home: Can the NFL make being there match whats on TV? The newspaper quoted fans who said they would rather stay putsaving money, avoiding traffic, having easier and cheaper access to food and beverage, as well as enjoying a better overall football-viewing experience via their HDTVs. (One former season-ticket holder boasted of having five television screensand presumably five different gameson simultaneously.) NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, recognizing the rising competition between the in-person and from-home experiences, commented, We have to bring technology to our stadiums to make that experience better.

This dynamic between the real and the virtual, between atoms and bits, between other-staged and self-directed time, defines the competitive landscape that Joe Pine and Kim Korn so richly explore in the pages that follow. Today, nearly every business must join the NFL in tackling its own digital media strategy to contend with the disruptive forces that accompany our electronic age. Pine (my business partner of fifteen years at Strategic Horizons LLP) and Korn (whom Ive come to know through his in-person participation at our firms annual thinkAbout events) provide an invaluable service in expanding the purview for navigating the digital frontier. Many people today merely view this new dynamic in terms of the physical and the virtual. Pine and Korn go beyond these dual domains of (what they term) Reality and Virtuality to define six additional realms that together form octants in a Multiverse of infinite possibility that stands before us. The model they present is not easy to digest, for they split three perpendicular coordinate planes (of time, space, and matter) to create a 2 2 2 frameworkenough to frighten away any casual reader. But I urge you to approach the model and their tome like Yogi Berra: When you come to a (three-pronged) fork in the road, take it! Take it: for the journey will open up myriad new ways of thinking more richly about the future of your business.

Knowing Joe Pine has long found inspiration from the work of Stan Davis, I went back and reread the foreword that Stan wrote nearly two decades ago for Joes first book, Mass Customization. In it Davis shared two interrelated perspectives: first, how management often mistakenly sees the world in terms of parts/wholes instead of holistically pursuing new value-creating forms of business; and second, how executives usually frame most of their decisions around false dichotomies. This faulty thinking continues to this day: Physical vs. Virtual, Atoms vs. Bits, Stadium vs. Home.

To date, most enterprises have treated new digital technologies as an incremental part tacked onto the existing whole. The results all too frequently intrude on the experience, rather than more subtly and holistically enriching it. A retail bank sticks plasma TVs up on the wall behind its tellers to stream video content irrelevant to the transactions being performed, rather than use digital media in an interactive way to speed up the line. A museum places freestanding kiosks at every turn, unused or abused until sitting in disrepair, instead of designing new ways of technologically introducing context or inciting action that draws patrons into its core exhibits.

Instead of making the real-world experience better, digital technology often worsens it. Im not one to go to many NFL games, as baseball is my sports passion. After twenty-five years of being a (full) season ticket holder with the Cleveland Indians, Ive recently discontinued the purchase. Why? Not because my beloved Tribe has lately fielded weaker teams (I actually like watching the young talent develop over time), but because the electronic output on the teams new $8 million scoreboardWhack a Mole and Pong contests, movie trivia, dance competitions, as well as other non-baseball fan-cam featuresand the blasting of unsolicited music (why is it that sports arenas with these jumbo TVs usually have such poor sound systems?) too greatly detracts from the actual baseball experience. If I want a video experience, Ill stay at home and watch the MLB Network; for real baseball, I plan to take in the Lorain County Ironmen of the Prospect League top college prospects playing a summer schedule using wood instead of aluminum bats and more importantly, no digital-experience intrusions.