It's about human experiences… and beyond, to co-creation

I would like to first acknowledge and congratulate Vargo and Lusch (2010) for attempting in this issue of Industrial Marketing Management to broaden the perspective of the market. My concern is that the authors don't go far enough. The fundamental reason, I believe, is the authors' own dominant logic of the nature of value — that value is a function of service, rather than human experiences. Before I proceed with offering this alternate logic, let me provide some context. During 2000–2004, I co-authored a series of articles on the implications for business and society of the more connected and empowered customer (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004). We detailed the shifting of competencies toward a network of customer communities and global talent outside the firm on one hand, and the emergence of global resource networks of firms on the other. We suggested that customer experience is central to enterprise value creation, innovation, strategy and executive leadership. These broad changes in business and society, we argued, called for co-creation — the practice of developing systems, products, or services through collaboration with customers, managers, employees, and other stakeholders. The book we then wrote, The Future of Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 2004) offered a series of compelling examples showing that value is increasingly being created jointly by the firm and the customer, rather than created entirely inside the firm. We held that customers seek the freedom of choice to interact with firms through a range of experiences. We argued that the concept of the market is no longer about people as a target for the goods and services offered by the firm, but a forum where people outside the firm are integral to the value creation process of firms. As individuals and firms engage in a process of creating value together, their cocreation experiences become the new basis of value. To quote from this 2004 book (p. 96), “Acronyms like B2B and B2C miss the point. If we must use an acronym, then let's use I2N2I which represents the flow from individuals to the nodal firm and its network and back to the individual.” The primary forces driving this shift to co-creation of value through human experiences, facilitated by the firm's network (including communities outside the firm) were information and communications technologies that propelled an unprecedented shift in people's capacity to be informed, networked, and empowered. It commenced an ongoing journey for me, joined in 2005 by my