Infinite Possibility

Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore’s classic The Experience Economy identified a seismic shift in the business world: to set yourself apart from your competition, you need to stage experiences—memorable events that engage people in inherently personal ways. But as consumers increasingly experience the world through their digital gadgets, companies still only scratch the surface of technology-infused experiences. So Pine and coauthor Kim Korn show you how to create new value for your customers with offerings that fuse the real and the virtual. Think of the Xbox Kinect, which combines virtual video games with a powerful physical dimension—you play by moving your own body; new apps that, when you point your smartphone camera at a real street, overlay digital information about the scene onto the image; and virtual dashboards that track the real world, moment by moment. Digital technology offers limitless opportunities—you really can create anything you want—but real-world experiences have a richness that virtual ones do not. So how can you use the best of both? How do you make sense of such infinite possibility? What kinds of experiences can you create? Which ones should you offer? Pine and Korn provide a profound new tool geared to exploring and exploiting the digital frontier. They delineate eight different realms of experience encompassing various aspects of Reality and Virtuality and, using scores of examples, show how innovative companies operate within and across each realm to create extraordinary customer value. Follow them out onto the digital frontier to discover the opportunities that abound for your business.