Press contact: Cynthia Shannon, cshannon (at) bkpub.com, 415-743-6469

Reality, Virtuality… and Infinite Possibility Beyond

San Francisco, CA – Twelve years ago, savvy business readers were introduced to The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), which described how goods and services were no longer enough; what people wanted were experiences – memorable events that engaged people in an inherently personal way. Famed management advisor B. Joseph Pine II demonstrated with his co-author James H. Gilmore that this was a fundamental shift in the very fabric of the economy, and provided principles and frameworks that any company could use to stage experiences and thereby create economic value.

In Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier (August 1, 2011; $26.95; 288 pages; ISBN 978-1-60509-563-9), The Experience Economy is brought into the digital age. Pine teams up with Kim C. Korn to help executives, managers, and experience designers – as well as those interested in understanding how technology is re-shaping modern life – make sense of all the ways digital technology infuses our experiences.

At the core of Infinite Possibility is a new framework that builds on the fundamental nature of the created universe – time, space, and matter – by showing how digital technology flips each of these dimensions on their head to create new worlds, first in our imagination and then in our experience. Companies create value today not just through material substances, but more and more with digital substances, employing bits more than atoms. They increasingly interact with customers not in real places but in virtual placesautonomous events rather than be tied down by the actual events of real life.

Businesses across all industries embrace digital technology, but there hasn’t been the right vocabulary to communicate its power and possibility – until now.

The end result: digital technology takes us beyond the known universe into the Multiverse, defining eight different realms of experience. It is anchored by the Reality of the physical world on one side and by Virtuality on the other – all the ways we can experience web sites, social media, games, and virtual worlds on a screen. But beyond these lie six other realms, six ways that companies can fuse the real and the virtual to create the experiences people crave and from which businesses create value.

One of these realms has already entered the vocabulary of business is Augmented Reality – the use of digital substances to enhance our real-world experiences such as provided by GPS navigators. Another is becoming more and more widespread – such as how first Nintendo’s Wii and now Microsoft’s Kinect let us get our entire bodies engaged in virtual experiences – but without the proper language to communicate it and therefore build upon it in new and engaging ways. In the context of the Multiverse, that name becomes obvious: Augmented Virtuality, the use of material substances to enhance virtual-world experiences.

Infinite Possibility outlines these as well as the other realms of the Multiverse, and how companies can use them to create new-to-the-world experiences infused with the digital technology that is becoming more and more a part of our everyday lives. Pine and Korn enable readers even to think beyond the confines of these realms to embrace all the ways each of these variables – actual and autonomous events, real and virtual places, material and digital substances – can be combined and fused into third spaces that truly open up a vast new Multiverse of opportunity.

For when you understand and apply this framework, you will quickly see that the possibilities are limited only by our imagination… and of that there is no end.

About the Authors

B. Joseph Pine II is a speaker and management advisor as well as the bestselling coauthor of The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999, with an Updated Edition in Summer 2011) and Authenticity (Harvard Business Press, 2007). He also wrote Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 1993). Mr. Pine cofounded Strategic Horizons LLP to help businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings.

Kim C. Korn is a management practitioner turned author, speaker, and business consultant. As founder of Business Architecture Inc. he helps companies unlock their potential to thrive indefinitely by becoming capable of creating ever-greater value. Prior to forming BAi, Kim held several positions at Andersen Corporation (Andersen Windows) and Andersen Consulting (Accenture).

Additional Resources

Concrete Examples to Describe the Realms of the Multiverse

Ten Suggested Interview Questions

A great way to further understand this new concept is to watch Joe Pine explain it directly at his TED presentation in San Diego: http://bit.ly/dYIvx1

Berrett-Koehler Author Video: http://bit.ly/fVw2UX

Author Day Video http://bit.ly/c2206H