Mateus 13:9

Recordo "Mongo a bater à porta. Tão bom!!!" e:

"O artigo é um exemplo da tendência que enquadramos no fenómeno a que chamamos de Mongo. Os gigantes, emaranhados com o seu umbigo, muito preocupados com a eficiência e os custos, tentando ser tudo para todos, abrem as oportunidades a novos actores."

Agora encontro "When Patients Become Innovators":

"Patients are increasingly able to conceive and develop sophisticated medical devices and services to meet their own needs — often without any help from companies that produce or sell medical products.
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Unlike traditional producers, who start with market research and R&D, free innovation begins with consumers identifying something they need or want that is not available in the marketplace. To address this, they invest their own funds, expertise, and free time to create a solution. Rather than seeking to protect their designs from imitators, as commercial innovators do, we found that more than 90% of consumer innovators make their designs available to everyone for free.
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The ability of patients to develop new medical products to serve their own needs is growing, and we expect the system to become stronger over time for several important reasons. First, the DIY design tools that patient innovators need are becoming cheaper and increasingly capable. People with fairly rudimentary engineering skills can acquire powerful design software that can run on an ordinary personal computer either for free or for very little money. Second, the materials and tools used to build products from DIY designs are also becoming both cheaper and increasingly capable."

Recordo também "Os humanos são todos diferentes":

“There is no perfect product, because there is no perfect patient” and “It’s a good product, but it’s not right for everyone.”

Recordo também esta leitura de 2007:

"In 1970, 5% of global patents were issued to small entrepeneurs, while today the number is around one-third and rising. When P&G realized this, it saw that its old model of purely internal innovation was suboptimal. Why not tap these entrepeneurs and scientists?"

E esta outra de 2011:

"The mass market — which made average products for average people was invented by organizations that needed to keep their factories and systems running efficiently.
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Stop for a second and think about the backwards nature of that sentence.
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The factory came first. It led to the mass market. Not the other way around."

 E deixo-vos com os industrialistas e a sua tendência para a suckiness.

"will lead to a big change for manufacturing"

Os trechos que se seguem parecem retirados daqui do blogue. Há anos que escrevemos sobre esta tendência.

"Personalised production is an evolution of customization that enables companies to differentiate their offer through innovative products for specific needs of a customer or a target group thanks to adaptable and reconfigurable production systems supported by easy-to-use product configuration systems to make processes along the supply chain efficient. In this scope, the proposed mission is to turn ideas into products by transforming passive consumers into active participants in the production of their own products thanks to new technologies that can enhance and empower their capabilities. This mission implies a paradigm shift because innovation will not originate anymore from the identification of consumer requirements; indeed, innovation and production will be taken out of the factory boundaries to allow people to be the decision makers during the design and production process in new collaborative supply chain models.
Consumer goods (e.g. clothing, footwear, sports items, glasses) but also other kinds of product such as medical products (personalised orthopaedic prosthetics, dental prosthetics, etc.) or durable goods (cars, kitchens, buildings facades, etc.), and even food can be produced based on the ideas of and by customers applying an approach of self-managed personalisation. In this way, they can create products with a unique design and style, along with functional and comfort-related aspects, going beyond the conventional choice dictated by off-the-shelf products.
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This mission will lead to a big change for manufacturing heading towards socialization and massive involvement of consumers. Many small and medium sized manufacturers (e.g. SMEs, fab-labs and even individuals) will participate in different market segments, while evolving into production service providers to satisfy customers’ personalised requirements. These entities will further aggregate into dynamic communities in a decentralized system and win bargaining power and efficiency. Moreover, new companies will basically sell ideas and their integration into new and dynamic value chains and markets.
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The implementation of the proposed mission will have an indirect impact also on sustainability since production will shift from Make-to-Stock to Customise-to- Order,"

Trechos retirados de "Key Research Priorities for Factories of the Future—Part I: Missions" de Tullio Tolio, Giacomo Copani e Walter Terkaj, publicado em "Factories of the Future The Italian Flagship Initiative", 

"Brands must focus on what makes their customers alike"

"Brand managers are under intense pressure to personalize their marketing efforts. McKinsey calls data activation and personalization the heartbeat of modern marketing.
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But there’s a big danger to personalization as well. When done right, it can give managers unprecedented access to buyers at the right places and times. But done wrong, it can do long-term damage to any business. It can even destroy a brand.
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Brands must focus on what makes their customers alike — not on what makes them different."

Um tema a merecer reflexão.

Por um lado, Mongo a entranhar-se e a criar mais tribos. Por outro lado, a McKinsey trabalha para empresas grandes. Também recordo:

“Using data from 200 US companies, the authors identified a trade-off between the pursuit of higher market share and higher customer satisfaction, which itself is seen as an important driver of long-term profitability. The authors explain this through the heterogeneity of consumer preferences: the larger a company becomes, the harder it is for the company to meet consumer preferences.”

Prefiro pensar que as marcas devem usar o seu ADN e assumi-lo, como critério para escolher os seus clientes e encontrar o meio-termo


Trechos retirados de "Don’t Let Marketing Personalization Kill Your Brand"

Os humanos são todos diferentes

Efforts to reduce diagnostic errors using human intelligence :-) pic.twitter.com/baFIKGA4KI

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) January 31, 2019

Relacionar com "The Art of Evidence-Based Medicine":

"No one would disagree that clinical decisions should be based on the highest quality, systematic evidence that is available. However, there is a critical misunderstanding of what information randomized trials provide us and how health care providers should respond to the important information that these trials contain."

É uma versão da tendência para hospitais-cidade e escolas-cidade com base no eficientismo.

"Although, in theory, evidence-based medicine does not assume that when faced with two treatment options, patients should always receive the treatment that was more effective in randomized controlled trials, this tends to be what happens in practice. Treatments shown to be inferior, on average, in randomized controlled trials are assumed by many to be inferior for all patients — so much so that keeping a given patient, or a large population of patients, on the inferior treatment is viewed as a departure from evidence-based medicine.
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Consider, for example, an informed and experienced clinician who recommends to a minority of his or her patients a treatment that has been shown to be, on average, inferior to alternative treatments in randomized controlled trials. Does this reflect a failure to practice evidence-based medicine? Is this doctor simply unaware of the data or weighing their own anecdotal experience over that of systematic investigations into the treatment’s efficacy? Or is the doctor combining the new evidence with what he or she knows about the patient?"

Os humanos são todos diferentes. Recordar 2014 e "Um antropologista entra num bar... (parte II)":

“There is no perfect product, because there is no perfect patient” and “It’s a good product, but it’s not right for everyone.”
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Stoma patients’ bodies are all so diferent that no single solution exists. The main challenge wasn’t the type of stoma a patient had—it was the type of body a patient had. That might seem an obvious point, but Coloplast’s innovation process had blinded management and R&D engineers alike to the possibility. Just as individuals can sufer from confrmation bias (a refexive seeking of only information that supports an existing position), so can entire organizations.
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This was a major problem—and, incredibly, no one in the billion-dollar industry had addressed it. It immediately became clear that Coloplast needed to categorize body types and create products designed specifically for each one."

BINGO!! (parte II)

Parte I.

Ainda de "Value Never Actually Disappears, It Just Shifts From One Place To Another" sublinho outro tema clássico aqui no blogue:

"You Can’t Compete With A Robot By Acting Like OneThe future is always hard to predict. While it was easy to see that Amazon posed a real problem for large chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, it was much less obvious that small independent bookstores would thrive. In much the same way, few saw that ten years after the launch of the Kindle that paper books would surge amid a decline in e-books.
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The one overriding trend over the past 50 years or so is that the future is always more human. In Dan Schawbel’s new book, Back to Human, the author finds that the antidote for our overly automated age is deeper personal relationships. Things like trust, empathy and caring can’t be automated or outsourced.
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There are some things a machine will never do. It will never strike out in a little league game, have its heart broken or see its child born. That makes it hard — impossible really — for a machine ever to work effectively with humans as a real person would. The work of humans is increasingly to work with other humans to design work for machines.
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That why perhaps the biggest shift in value is from cognitive to social skills. [Moi ici: Engraçado que cada vez mais dou comigo a pensar que um número crescente de artigos em revistas ditas de gestão ocupam o seu espaço com temas que a minha mãe, ou a catequese, ou o pertencer a uma associação, ou o pertencer a um grupo de colegas de rua me ensinaram e que parece que agora estão em falta] The high paying jobs today have less to do with the ability to retain facts or manipulate numbers (we now use a computer for those things), but require more deep collaboration, teamwork and emotional intelligence."

O quanto os gigantes gostariam que o factor humano fosse removido da equação... mas a imperfeição é cool, e a desautomatização está a crescer.

Project Based Organisation

Mongo também passa por isto:

"The number and importance of projects are increasing steadily. Projects are being used to deliver innovative products and services, to perform change and transformation and – in general – get things done in organisations.
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A project based organisation (PBO) is ... one in which the project is the primary unit for performing certain tasks.
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Processes in a PBO are organised from the client to the client, a value stream of activities, orchestrated by a project manager, using agile or traditional methods, tools and techniques. The culture of a PBO is clearly project-friendly, client-centric and oriented towards “doing the right things right”, which means combining effectiveness and efficiency.
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A PBO may comprise several firms, for example a project consortium or network organisation, and thus is temporarily organised, flexible and adaptable to the specific circumstances of the project, its context and partners.
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The more we see a change from products to services, from mass production to individualisation, from single organisations performing projects to a co-creative network of partners, the more we´ll see PBO as a role model. So PBOs are a trend which will change the way of organising, and the transformation of many organisations prove that this process is already taking place. We need to see this from an economic perspective, identify the drivers for this change and the impact it may have for traditional organisations."

Trechos retirados de "Will project-based organisations be the new normal?"

"psychological ownership"

"psychological ownership. That’s when consumers feel so invested in a product that it becomes an extension of themselves.
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Companies that encourage psychological ownership can entice customers to buy more products, at higher prices, and even to willingly promote those products among their friends. But if businesses disrespect this feeling, sales can suffer."

Em "How Customers Come to Think of a Product as an Extension of Themselves" um texto sobre como promover a "psychological ownership":

• "One way is to allow customers a hand in forming the product"
• "Businesses should strive to make products customizable. When consumers can personalize products, they buy more and are happy to recommend those products to friends."
• "Building intimate knowledge - This occurs when customers believe they know every facet of a product or brand so well that they have a special, unique relationship with it."

"Companies legally own their brand, but their most devoted customers may own it psychologically. Businesses should cultivate this feeling—and then respect it."

Acerca da fábrica do futuro

Um artigo interessante, "Inside the Digital Factory", que aborda vários teas acerca da fábrica do futuro, mas que convenientemente esquece as implicações da democratização da produção. Adiante:

"heralding a new era for manufacturers, marked by totally integrated factories that can rapidly tailor products to individual customer needs and respond instantly to shifting demands and trends. This fully digital factory can be a catalyst for a kinetic growth agenda delivering gains in productivity, financial and operational performance, output, and market share [Moi ici: LOL!!! Até parece que Mongo vai ser terra de competir por market share!] as well as improved control and visibility throughout the supply chain.
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98 percent of respondents still view digitization somewhat blandly as a path for increasing production efficiency.  [Moi ici: Conheço esta gente. Muitos são boa gente, mas estão de tal forma moldados pelo modelo mental anterior que não conseguem fugir dele. Também por isso vão ser vítimas do que esteve na base do seu sucesso no nível anterior do jogo] But at the same time, a whopping 74 percent of companies named regionalization (being able to set up or expand factories in markets where their products are sold and where opportunities exist to widen revenue streams through customized products and improved service levels) as a primary reason for digital investments. [Moi ici: Uma fábrica para cada continente, dizem algumas multinacionais mais dinâmicas, mas não estão a ver que não é uma questão de eficiência, é uma questão de interacção, de customização, de relação, de proximidade]
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Moreover, in a sharp departure from the recent past, the possibility of being able to immediately tailor products to match customer preferences and to offer customers the option to “build” their own products appears to be driving production decisions more strongly than slashing labor costs.  [Moi ici: Q.E.D.] Indeed, only about 20 percent of respondents now plan to relocate manufacturing facilities to low-wage countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America; nearly 80 percent are looking at Western Europe (where their largest customer bases are) for new digital factory capacity."

O trecho que se segue parece retirado do discurso do meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras:

"One of the more intractable obstacles to a successful digital factory is the makeup of the workforce itself. This type of advanced production approach represents an entirely new model of human–machine interaction, one that not many workers — or manufacturers — are prepared for. In our view, understanding the impact on the people in the company is at least as important as calculating the financial benefit of the digital factory, in part because the former will ultimately impinge on the latter. Employees who feel marginalized by the emphasis on new technologies or who are not equipped to work in that environment will compromise the factory’s chances for success."

Nós é que sabemos o que é melhor para os clientes

“Cars go to a diverse audience and diverse customers, and people don’t always agree with the balance or compromises, and you can’t get upset with that,”

Mesmo no final do artigo, "Car Engineers Scoff at Enthusiasts’ Modifications. But Not Always.",  aparece o trecho acima.

Algo que ajuda a explicar Mongo e a democratização da produção, algo que ajuda a explicar a co-criação, algo que ajuda a explicar o sucesso da Local Motors, algo que ajuda a explicar porque as empresas grandes vão perder o seu mercado actual (a reacção dos engenheiros das marcas):

"“I have no doubt in my mind they cannot do it better,”
...
“They can never achieve the finely balanced trade-off we have achieved,”"

Mas a verdade é:

“The reason the market grows the way it does is that the carmakers have a mass-production model and it does not leave a whole lot of room for people who want to improve or personalize or upgrade their cars and trucks,” he said.
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Social media — like websites or Facebook pages for owners of specific models — is also playing an increasing role, Mr. Kersting said.
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“Now people who have similar interests are able to find one another and share expertise and the passion they have for whatever segment of automotive lifestyle or hobby they enjoy,” he said. “It has been very good for the market.”"

O futuro passará por voltar ao passado

“In the 1950’s footwear brands offered many different widths and in-store customer service for bespoke fitting. However, with mass scale global production in the 1970’s and fast fashion of today, this went away. Now 90% of the population buy the wrong shoe sizes or don’t even know their correct shoe size. This has created an average of 20% return rate from brick and mortar and e-commerce sales. This mounts to annual 80 billion of lost revenue for the footwear industry! Thus, the pain point is in correct sizing, fitting and reducing returns and not necessarily figuring out the new trendy color for the spring collection. By offering consumers 127 sizes you can capture 90% more of the population simply by offering a vast size range that serves the consumer directly for accurate fit with 3mm increments. The 90% of the population needs to be provided for different widths and global sizing fitting to encompass all markets. 127 sizes will also increase revenue for brands to better serve the consumer for a better fit.”

O futuro passará por voltar ao passado. Uma ideia que não é nova neste blogue.

Trecho retirado de "Janne Kyttanen: Finding the magic number for customization utilizing 3D printing in your industry"

"a natural fit for their agile development philosophies"

"Domestic manufacturing enables companies like Burrow and Chapter 3 to continually refine their designs and ramp production up and down in response to customer feedback. They can also ship directly to consumers, reducing delivery times.
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“[Burrow] can send over an idea to me or my husband, and sometimes in the same day we can mock up a modification of something,” Schock says. “We can get the email, walk downstairs to the plant, and pull it together.”
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She adds: “The consumer, if they want more choices, you’re going to need to have shorter lead times and smaller quantities. Importing doesn’t adhere to those things.”
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he and others are discovering that domestic manufacturing is a natural fit for their agile development philosophies. “I’ve made stuff in China, it’s a huge pain in the ass. You can’t be very reactive in your iteration process, and there are high minimum order quantities,” Kan says. “The cool thing about the internet is that you can make changes very quickly. Taking some of that to the physical goods world is really good.”"

Demoram tanto a perceber isto?

Trechos retirados de "From Mexico To Mississippi: Why This Sofa Startup Is Now “Made In The USA”"

Sintomas de um mundo em mudança

• Digitalização 3D simplifica a compra e a produção em massa de calçados personalizados
• How a Few Brands Are Making Made-to-Measure Fashion Accessible
• Shoemakers bring bespoke footwear to the high street

A crescente procura pela customização

"Organizations are naturally inclined to routinize things, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Through experience, they develop stable ways of working that coordinate and combine the efforts of various people and specialists. When an IVF clinic follows the standard protocol for a regular patient, for example, everybody knows exactly what to do and when, and the organization executes this task without much effort or disruption. It makes production fast, efficient, and reliable. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with fast, efficient, and reliable. But if you want to innovate, you'll need to disrupt this routine, and develop new solutions and new ways of working.
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To put it bluntly, your team needs to makes its own life difficult. This is exactly what IVF clinics did when they didn't turn away difficult cases. By treating patients with complex etiologies, they experienced more valuable learning opportunities than if they concentrated exclusively on higher-probability cases. By experimenting, reflectively communicating about the results, and codifying their newfound knowledge—the three critical components of team learning behavior—the clinics were able to improve their practices in the long term.
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You can't innovate without ever trying something new. This may sound quite obvious - and, frankly, it is - but many organizational processes and practices are precisely aimed at not doing this. Process management techniques (such as ISO 9001), for instance, are aimed at making processes more reliable and secure. In general, organizations are inclined to try to rule out variability and instead concentrate on what works best."

Li isto e relacionei logo com "The Great Strength and Debilitating Weakness of Modern Medicine… and Management" e:

"The great strength of modern medicine lies in the fits that work. The patient enters the hospital with a diseased heart and leaves soon after with a repaired one. But where the fit fails can be found modern medicine’s debilitating weakness. Fits fail, more often generally realized, beyond the categories, across the categories, and beneath the categories.
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Dr. Atul Gawande, in a New Yorker article entitled “The Bell Curve” (6 December 2004), reported on his observation of a renowned cystic fibrosis physician. He wrote the protocols that others used, yet had much better results. Meeting a young woman, and seeing a reduced measure of lung-function, he asked if she was taking her treatments. She said that she was. But he probed further, to discover that she had a new boyfriend and a new job that were getting in the way of taking those treatments. Together they figured out how she could alter her schedule.
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Here, then, lay the good doctor’s secret: he treated the person and not just the patient, by delving beneath the medical context, to her personal situation."

Escrevi há anos um postal, que agora não consigo recuperar sobre uma empresa de dispositivos médicos que era muito eficiente e muito bem sucedida, mas quando quis dar um salto descobriu o poder da "to makes its own life difficult" ao começar a trabalhar no aprofundamento da customização.

Trechos iniciais retirados de "Breaking Bad Habits" de Freek Vermeulen.

"Giants invariably descend into suckiness" (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

"Not only did print on demand provide an easy way to offer my customers more options, but it was also a simple way to spread brand awareness without having to fill my apartment with inventory.
The world of print-on-demand fashion has revolutionized the side hustle and merchandising game for many entrepreneurs. There is no risk in launching a new T-shirt design in your store because there is no preprinting and inventory required.
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“E-commerce is all about finding ways to do things faster, cheaper, and easier,” ... “The fact that I can run a profitable business out of my home, with no office space, employees, or startup costs is pretty phenomenal.”
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Some store owners have taken advantage of these same tools to make hyper-personalized items.
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Despite these advantages, one of the largest downsides to print on demand remains the price. When no quantities are guaranteed up front, the prices for printing are not cheap, leaving a low profit margin for the seller.
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Print-on-demand platforms make it easy for artists to list their work on a multitude of shirts, posters, mugs, and so on without testing them in advance. Companies make this variety tempting to give customers a greater selection and increase the chances they’ll make a purchase.
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In our fast-paced era of online content creation, social media stars with big fan bases are becoming much more common. For smaller stars with dedicated followings, these on-demand opportunities can also be fantastic for creating branded merchandise. YouTubers and podcasters can let their fans be brand ambassadors, spreading the word and growing the hype.
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But on-demand printing is not limited to fashion. It’s also a wonderful way for writers to self-publish.
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Overall, on-demand printing and its integration with various platforms is empowering designers and creators alike to take charge over their creative ventures and not be limited by traditional business or industry barriers. It makes small fashion businesses more accessible and brings buyers a more custom experience."

Recordar todos aqueles que têm sempre na boca a inovação, a Indústria 4.0, a IA e, continuam a acreditar que a escala é tudo:

"Hoje em dia, na grande parte das actividades, a escala é muito importante."

E não percebem a dispersão crescente da procura, de como a autenticidade é cada vez mais importante e de como há cada vez menos barreiras à entrada: a democratização da produção.




Trechos retirados de "Technology Shaping the Fashion Industry"

"Giants invariably descend into suckiness" (parte II)

Parte I.

Quem ao longo dos anos segue este blogue, conhece a minha metáfora de Mongo sobre o mundo económico para onde caminhámos, e sobre como esse mundo representa um distanciamento face ao paradigma que formatou as universidades e os cursos de economia e gestão, moldados nos modelos da produção em massa, da escala, daquilo a que chamo de Metropolis ou Magnitogorsk, crentes na racionalidade das decisões.

Quem conhece a metáfora de Mongo, olhe bem para o tweet que se segue:

The explosion of craft brewing could be an early signal of a big shift away from standardized mass market products to tailored creative products, leading to a significant fragmentation of product businesses https://t.co/rF3q7MT48A

— John Hagel (@jhagel) January 27, 2018

Reparem:

"a big shift away from standardized mass market products to tailored creative products, leading to a significant fragmentation of product businesses"

Como isto é nem mais nem menos o que aqui dizemos desde Novembro de 2007:

"Se Chris Anderson tiver razão, e espero bem que sim, trata-se de uma esperança, para as sociedades dos países pequenos. Quanto mais aumentar o poder da cauda longa, mais oportunidades de negócio existirão, para as pequenas empresas, rápidas e flexíveis que apostarem na diferenciação, na diversidade, na variedade. A cabeça pode ficar para os asiáticos, mas a nata das margens, essa ficará para quem, como dizia Jesus Cristo, tiver olhos para ver, e ouvidos para ouvir, a corrente, a tendência de fundo."

Na parte III vamos mergulhar nas implicações das produções "on demand" para na parte IV analisarmos o artigo sobre as cervejas artesanais e o seu simbolismo.

Uma nova produção

"As manufacturing shifts from offshore mass production to customized, local fabrication, new jobs will open up for human workers, some of which have yet to reveal themselves. “We used to have distribution built around manufacturing,” Mandel says, referencing the centrality of offshore factories, “and now I think that manufacturing is going to be built around distribution.”"

Será que a unidade do futuro será mesmo a distribuição? Tendo a pensar que a unidade do futuro será a relação, será a interacção, será a co-criação, e todos os modelos de negócio que a fomentem e potenciem serão importantes.

Trecho retirado de "Inside Adidas’ Robot-Powered, On-Demand Sneaker Factory"

Acerca dos processos (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

Este trecho:

"The feel of Starbucks stores isn’t created merely by the layout and the décor—it exists because the people behind the counter understand how their work fits into a common purpose, and recognize how to accomplish great things together without needing to follow a script."

Retirado de "How to Excel at Both Strategy and Execution" e citado aqui permite conciliar o dilema da parte II.

Recordo, eu, um adepto incondicional da abordagem por processos, a sublinhar que os processos podem também ter um lado perverso quando cristalizam as práticas e impedem as organizações de fugir do incrementalismo.

Aquele sublinhado ali em cima fez-me pensar numa série de actividades que as pessoas têm de realizar e que estão sistematizadas em processos para o fazerem de forma uniforme e eficiente. E muitas organizações ficam-se por este nível. Outras, por causa da sua estratégia, por causa das suas pessoas, por causa dos seus clientes, por causa de uma mistura destas coisas, olham para o processo como uma espécie de esqueleto, um script-base, e sobre ele começam a construir camadas de interacção, camadas de personalização, camadas de facilitados de co-criação de valor que acabam por  descaracterizar o script inicial num conjunto de scripts adequados a cada contexto numa relação 1-para-1.

"Value over volume"

Há dias criticavam a União Europeia por esta querer relacionar o aumento do número de professores com a melhoria dos resultados dos alunos.

Onde é que já se viu tamanha enormidade?! (Estou a ser irónico)

Eis o futuro na saúde, também:

"Doctors and hospitals are increasingly being paid not for the quantity of care they provide, but for the outcome or quality of care patients receive. The emerging trend in health care is about rewarding value, rather than volume. This is the future, where there is less focus on the number of tests or treatments a patient receives and more focus on whether a patient’s health is improving.
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Roughly 20 agreements have been announced in recent months, and each is developed with differing details. For example, some result in larger rebates or lower prices if a drug does not lead to its intended results. Other arrangements let patients “try before you buy” and only require payment if the therapy works. Still others promote “pay for performance” in which a drug’s cost is tied to its effectiveness....While nearly 90 percent of all drugs on the market are low-cost generic medicines, roughly 5 percent of patients take so-called “specialty” drugs to treat serious or life-threatening diseases. These drugs represent one-third of all drug spending, and this trend is expected to continue with the discovery of new treatments for rare diseases and other highly personalized medicines."

Trechos retirados de "The future of drug pricing: Value over volume"

Permutar não é arte

"It’s no secret that the world of in-person, store-based retail is losing a major portion of its business to online retailing.  This isn’t surprising. Any store can lose business when competitive stores open up, especially when those competitors offer advantages it can’t offer, such as breadth of selection, price and convenience.
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But online retailing doesn’t hold all of the advantages. If brick and mortar retailers want to survive – and even thrive – in this new marketplace, it’s important they play to their strengths and not to the strengths of their online competitors.
Let’s start with in-person retailing most important competitive advantage: It’s in person.
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A store sales person has the opportunity to engage a customer, learn about them, and customize the dialogue in way that is personally relevant to that customer.  An amazon.com page may be able to offer a buyer products that are relevant based on past browsing or purchases, but amazon.com is unable to help the customer form a nuanced, personalized, meaningful story about how a certain product is a great choice for them. [Moi ici: Daí a importância das interacções essa magia que sublinhamos vezes sem conta nesta vida] As amazing as it is, amazon.com is essentially the world’s biggest, most high-powered vending machine.
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This is the first element that can distinguish an in-person store experience: the feeling that a real person is working with you to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. [Moi ici: E com uma "real person" há a possibilidade de criar algo de novo, há a possibilidade da arte. Customização matemática, permutar materiais e cores, não é o mesmo que arte]
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Brick and mortar retailers have lost many of the advantages they once had, including providing better access to products and the convenience of “location, location, location.” But they still have the advantage of proximate, meaningful human contact, which, in many situations, is a competitive advantage that can win the love – and loyalty – of customers."

Trechos retirados de "How Not to Fail at Retail"

Co-criação de valor - uma fonte

Quando escrevo sobre Mongo, sobre um mundo de artesãos, um mundo de mais proximidade, um mundo de mais customização, um mundo de menos vómito industrial, um mundo de mais significados, penso no aumento da co-criação e penso que esta pode ser realmente uma vantagem competitiva que as PME podem usar para viverem e terem sucesso. Acredito mesmo nisto:

"Value cocreation has long been praised as the next source of competitive advantage for service providers in the 21st century. The value of focusing on value cocreation as a source of competitive advantage lies in the interactions service providers develop with their customers and their potential to generate value for their customers. These interactions present a certain level of intimacy with the service provider’s customers, ensuring that they are difficult to replicate for competitors, and can yield long-term benefits such as customer loyalty and high lifetime share of wallet"

Por isso, recomendo vivamente a leitura de "Value cocreation in service interactions: Dimensions and antecedents" de Carmen Neghina, Marjolein C. J. Caniëls e Josée M. M. Bloemer, publicado por Marketing Theory, Volume: 15 issue: 2, page(s): 221-242, 2015. 

Uma boa fonte de informação sobre o "estado da arte"