Get ready: Here comes the 'prosumer economy': "Kelly believes - and this is a Fortune 100 adviser, mind you - that material consumption is being replaced by, for want of a better word, spiritual consumption. In a nutshell, quality supersedes quantity, a trend I believe we are already starting to see. For companies, that implies 'a massive emphasis on co-creation with consumers,' evolving into what Kelly calls the 'prosumer economy.'
It also presages, he believes, a transition from traditional models of competition to shared 'webs' of innovation. 'Companies are going to have to be more agile, more collaborative.'"
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I wonder how that mentality will affect the real estate development industry. CID housing epitomizes the consumer economy, with not just the home, but the neighorhood itself being turned into a mass-produced and highly standardized commodity. Will developers pay more attention to what people really want, as opposed to what they can be convinced to buy and put up with?
2 comments:
"CID housing" however isn't a consumer commodity. Not even condominium shares can be accurately described as "housing" per se. They're really more a real estate investment security than real property since a condo owner purchases only rights to the airspace of a particular unit and not land, brick and mortar.
Rather CIDs are more accurately described -- as you have done in your 1994 book Privatopia -- as a public policy shift toward the privatization of local government driven by the land use policies of municipalities and counties.
I'm not so sure, with places like Chicago effectively requiring CID, that we'll see a dramatic change in packaging; and whether or not we see quality as in decent materials and decent construction standards, that too is going to depend on regulation. Realistically a good solution would be stricter building standards and less CID fetishism; you regulate what's expensive to replace and deregulate obvious biases in the playing field. There's still almost no limit to what junk consumers will buy if it has a a veneer of quality to it, such as a granite countertop, but it doesn't do the economy much good when it leaks a waterfall through the roof in ten years.
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