This post continues my walkthrough of the last chapter – albeit in draft form, as I already know a number of places where I’ll be changing things thanks to the reviews I’ve received from Harvard Business Review Press! More on that to come as I work through the edits.
I write here about the implications of something I wrote about in the very first chapter on the Progression of Economic Value – that each successive economic offering is built and dependent on the ones below it. So, to guide transformations, you need to integrate experiences, services, goods, and sometimes even commodities into your offering.
A shout-out to Lance Bettencourt, Professor of Professional Practice at Texas Christian University, who as lead author of our HBR article “The 'New You' Business” introduced the idea of integrating solutions into that piece.
Joe
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Integrating Solutions
While I’m sure I’ve hammered home by now the idea that transformations are effected by experiences, remember too that as the Progression of Economic Value makes clear, experiences are built atop services, services are formed around goods, and goods are made out of commodities. Transformation offerings – across diagnosis, encapsulated experiences, and follow-through – require every level of the Progression to be used effectively. You must therefore integrate experiences, services, goods, and sometimes even commodities into one cohesive solution to determine and guide transformations.[i]
Transformation offerings require every level of the Progression to be used effectively.
In an extreme but inspiring case, The Hogeweyk is a “dementia village” in Weesp, Netherlands, “a familiar and safe environment in which people with dementia live while retaining their own identity and autonomy as much as possible”.[ii] It is a real neighborhood, with houses that harken back to various settings the over 180 residents remember and identity with from their pre-dementia days, such as urban, tradecraft, religious, and Indonesian (the country being a longtime Dutch colony). All the care staff, including psychiatrists, therapists, and social workers, take on normal neighborhood roles as neighbors, clerks, servers, and so forth. And so The Hogeweyk includes a supermarket for obtaining commodities and goods; services such as hairdressing salon, restaurant, and handyman; and experiences such as a theatre, pub, café, and of course a town square.
You need not, however, produce all such offerings, but can take advantage of other companies that do, whether buying them, collaborating with them to fit the needs of your offerings, or fully subsuming their offerings as part of your own. Some companies may find it advantageous to be a general contractor, bringing together a suite of customized offerings for each aspirant without effectively owning any of them.
You need not, however, produce all such offerings.
Of course, people – as well as organizations, businesses, and communities – can be their own general contractor and “hire” everything they need. Think of an aspiration to get more fit. A person could hire organic foodstuffs, self-help books, fitness-tracking devices and apps, fitness centers, and a personal trainer to achieve that aspiration. This is in fact the way most transformations occur today. But increasingly aspirants seek outside help from those who know how to do it better than they can figure it out themselves. That is the core opportunity as transformations closely follow experiences as the basis of the economy, an opportunity best captured by charging explicitly for transformations, not just as a premium on top of service or experience offerings.
Joe Pine
© 2025 B. Joseph Pine II
[i] The idea of integrating solutions was impressed on me by Lance Bettencourt, Professor of Professional Practice at Texas Christian University, along with partnering with aspirants, discussed earlier. See the section “Designing the Offering” in Bettencourt, et al, “The ‘New You’ Business”, Harvard Business Review, January-February 2022, pp. 79-80.
[ii] “The Hogeweyk”, Be the Care Concept, https://www.bethecareconcept.com/en/hogeweyk-dementia-village-hogeweyk-netherlands/.