Experience Platforms: Staging Experiences through an Ecosystem — with B. Joseph Pine II

Podcast Notes

In this episode we have the pleasure of speaking to Joe Pine, an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor.

Joe has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, the original TED conference in California, and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He’s a Lecturer in Columbia University’s Technology Management Program, and has co-founded Strategic Horizons LLP to help businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings.

As a prolific writer, Joe is most famous for his 1999 book The Experience Economy, which was updated in 2011 and re-released in hardcover in 2020 with new ideas on Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money.

Joe’s work on the experience economy has been central to our work on platform design and thinking, and so we wanted to explore with him what has changed — or not changed — in the original ideas of the book. We talk about how experiences cannot be “delivered” but staged, and how it’s important to also consider the experiences of the employees contributing to the development of the organization, and of the providers who participate in co-creating the platform, so that they can stage the best experiences.

The experience economy is not a fad, but a profound transformation of our economies. That’s why, like Joe points out, there is no “recovery” of the economy, without the recovery of experiences that people value. Peeking into the future, we see patterns of continued modularity of experiences, whether physical goods or activities that make up a final experience.

Once businesses recognize that they are staging experiences, not delivering services, they can gain much more economic value by leveraging on the time and attention of their guests.

To find out more about Joe’s work:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepine/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/joepine
• Website: https://strategichorizons.com/
• News: https://strategichorizons.com/contact/
• Starting a Multiclient study on Experience Platforms, December-February: https://platformstrategyinstitute.com/experience-platforms/
• New Book Release: B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money. 2019: https://www.amazon.com/Experience-Economy-New-Preface-Authors/dp/1633697975

Other references and mentions:

• MIT Platform Strategy Summit — Panel Discussion: Platforms and the Experience Economy: https://youtu.be/5m05-8bHVUM
• B. Joseph Pine II, Don Pepper and Martha Rogers. “Do You Want to Keep Your Customers Forever?”. 1995: https://hbr.org/1995/03/do-you-want-to-keep-your-customers-forever
• James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II. “The Four Faces of Mass Customization”. 1997: https://hbr.org/1997/01/the-four-faces-of-mass-customization
• B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. Welcome to the Experience Economy. 1998: https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy
• B. Joseph Pine II. “Embracing the Employee Experience: Part 1”. 2020: https://www.rightpoint.com/thought/articles/2020/07/21/embracing-the-employee-experience-part-1
• B. Joseph Pine II and Kim C. Korn. Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier. 2011: https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Possibility-Creating-Customer-Frontier/dp/160509563X
• Re-bundling the Firm around Problems to Be Solved — with Sangeet Paul Choudary: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/re-bundling-the-firm-around-jobs-to-be-done-with-sangeet-paul-choudary-af69f7d2bcbb
• Jon Jerde, experience architect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Jerde

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 29 September 2020.

Key Insights

1. The monetary value of time is a new measure introduced in the update of the book The Experience Economy. Now, every company competes against the world for the time, attention, and money of individual customers. In this context, experiences are “time well spent”, whereas services are “time well saved”. The money value of time well spent is the expenditure per minute that customers are paying , which can be compared across industries, across geographic areas, and across companies to understand how engaging an experience is.

2. Experience platforms are staging experiences through their ecosystems. The economic function is one of designing and staging the elements that come together to create experiences, which requires whole ecosystem mobilization. It is a matter of understanding that our customers are “guests” enjoying experiences. This calls for a “guest-centric” learning relationship around each individual guest, and platforms need to get to that level of doing that.

3. Modularity is the most important factor of mass customization and as this pattern continues to play out in the experience economy, we start to see organizations become more modular to match the modularity of what they can do, rebundling around experiences.

4. When it comes to transformational experiences (health, fitness, etc…), what transformation platforms need to charge for is the demonstrated outcome that customers achieve. The platform is enabling them to change, to achieve their aspirations and this will be a growing platform value proposition according to Joe.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organizing by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.