ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

I’ve just read a great HBR article called Co-opting Customer Competence by C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy. This article provides a novel framework for understanding the customer experience that casts customers as co-creators of value as opposed to passive buyers with a single role of consumption.

If your customers are co-creators of value you will gain competitive advantage that is hard pretty hard to duplicate, if your customers are part of the value then you could also benefit from positive network effects.

I like this business strategy perspective because it helps combine the softer idea that Liz Sanders talks about in her paper Virtuosos of the Experience Domain, that everyone is creative with the hard edge of what critical business function does this support.