The emerging present is a fast-changing context for incumbent organizations, especially in market segments where online behavior is replacing physical proximity, and users engage with digital platforms for the acquisition of products and services. These are platforms that allow users to behave, to leave a mark, and to participate in the community of others, which are the values people now seek.

Transforming Organizations for the Subscription Economy: Starting from Scratch aims to prepare executives for a world in which everything is social, augmented and autonomous; objects and spaces will have multiple purposes, capabilities and meanings. This is a new territory full of opportunity, which is generally discussed only at the level of technology involved, instead of the intellectual level, where the real understanding of the need for transformation resides. The book reveals ideas about what is possible if we transform the present. The narrative is organized around what is actual and what is potential; what is the probable future that we can arrive at through change, and what is the possible future that we can build through transformation. When engaging in transformation the following strategic question develops: if you were designing your organization today, how would you design it? In other words, how would you go about it starting from scratch?

This book provides the intellectual framework that empowers organizations to understand and navigate the emerging present, and to develop and deliver products and services of intrinsic value to users.

We live in a behavior economy, an environment in which people no longer engage with companies just by purchasing things, but they seek engagement with services that allow them to behave, to leave a mark, and to participate in the community of others.

The economic model promoted by the behavior economy is a model where behavior is the only goal of our actions, and where intrinsic motivation is the key to participation, engagement, and the satisfaction of multiple dimensions of value.

Value Creation in the Internet of Things describes value delivery and consumption, and the mechanisms by which new value is captured and created, in enterprises dedicated to competing and prospering in this new environment.

This book is significant in the context of the Internet of Things becoming mainstream, forcing organizations to re-examine their value creation methodologies in light of new consumer behavior and expectations. The Internet of Things is not an elective for enterprises operating in the behavior economy, just like the Internet was not an option. The Internet of Things will reframe the existence of the ones enriched by it. It will do so not because it can, but because our motivation will demand it. This is a book about reframing reality for new and incumbent organizations. The reality to reframe is not an imaginary one, but the immediate reality in which one operates: the behavior economy.

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This book is about value creation; it proposes that corporations do not design products or services anymore: they design behaviour spaces.

Facebook is not a product, not a technology, but a behaviour space. Behavior space is a multidimensional construct that includes time, rhythm, motion, attention, retention, a variety of stimuli and a variety of responses.  Behavior Space is the ecosystem of dependencies that insure the performance of a human activity and consists of  behavioral characteristics and their required media – products, systems, substances, energy – which form part of a set of actions directed toward a similar goal.  A behavior space is a platform for manifest behaviour around specific goals and motivators for action; the product or service is simply the disruptor that enables a new behaviour space to emerge. The size of the behaviour space footprint, represents the potential value a product or service offers; the greater the value potential, the greater the monetization potential.

Behaviour Space advances the idea that play value is essential in achieving satisfaction in the engagement between users and products or services, and in this process, transforming the user through new layers of pleasurable and productive engagement. The book outlines what gives products and services value for their intended user groups, and how this value can be created, sustained and monetized.

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“Disruptive Business” is a provocative and insightful redefinition of innovation as an outcome of human behaviour, a dynamic in constant change requiring the shaping of new responses in business and the economy. Alexander Manu believes that organizations must treat innovation not as a process to be managed but as an outcome that changes people’s lives. In “Disruptive Business” he explains how innovation is the moment when human behaviour is changed by a particular invention, discovery or event.

This position challenges the current understanding of innovation, as well as the current ecology in which innovation operates in organizations: its management, methods, tools, language, focus and metrics. The challenge extends to some of the labels currently applied to innovation typologies, such as ‘disruptive innovation’, seen today as addressing purely the technological side of an invention, rather than the more complex motivational and behavioural side. A disruption is not manifest in the moment a new technology is introduced. The disruption is the human being and manifest only when human motivation embraces the technology and uses it to modify and improve everyday life. Our acceptance and appropriation of new technologies creates the business disruption. The book makes the case that successful innovation outcomes are answers to conscious or subconscious goals residing in human motivation, and motivation starts in desire. This position is consistent with the history of innovations that have changed, improved and reshaped human life, and also consistent with their roots and ethos.

Humans are a ‘perpetually wanting animal’, bound to desire, to seek media for a better self and to need innovation. In this dynamic, innovation is the constant and business is the variable. The role of business is to create the tools, objects and services through which people can manifest what they want and who they are. The book provides a new perspective of current behavioural disruptions which are relevant to the continuity of business, as well as a set of practical methodologies for business design, aimed at creating innovation outcomes of value to users.

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Everything 2.0: Redesign your Business Through Foresight and Brand Innovation “Provocative author, speaker and leader in the emerging field of strategic foresight, Alexander Manu explains what motivates people and how desire is the driving force to true innovation. Drawing on the principles of the Web 2.0 phenomenon – the empowerment to create, manage and distribute content – this video explores consumers’ desire for openness, transparency, collaboration, and ultimately revealing themselves, and how tapping into this desire can lead to business innovation. Whether you are in the role of strategic product developer, or you are tasked with solving a global problem, this video will leave you with a new frame of reference for positioning your company’s future.

How can individuals and organizations cope with the challenges of our time? By deepening their understanding of human needs and reframing them as what they truly are: desire, wants, and visions of a better self. In Manu’s view, the new challenge for organizations is not in determining how to fit 2.0 to business but in determining how to fit business to Life 2.0.

Companies constantly present technological developments-new materials, new mechanisms, and new ways to enhance existing products and services. Yet these seldom lead to truly new ideas. Why? Humans are all born with creative instincts, but in the interest of efficient and predictable productivity, institutions such as schools and businesses routinely hinder those impulses. The most innovative products and services, author Alexander Manu argues, arise out of the behaviors of play–the ability to imagine, without limits, the question “What if…?”

Manu’s engaging and inspiring book offers companies a wealth of practical advice and tactics to unleash their full creative potential and break ahead of the crowd. Manu’s provocative, insightful applied methodologies for creating new business opportunities and transformative innovations gain resonance from real-world scenarios and conversations with leading innovators.

Readers will learn strategies to:

– Open their companies’ eyes to unseen opportunities

– Spark the imagination and trigger the potential of product innovation teams

– Turn inspired ideas into successful products and services.

Humane Village Journal 1.

Manu, Alexander, editor. 1994.

The Humane Village Centre for Compassionate Design.

Toronto. 118p.

ISSN 1198-7448

Humane Village Journal 2

Manu, Alexander, editor. 1995.

The Humane Village Centre for Compassionate Design. 185p..

ISBN 0-9699805-0-7