Real estate 2.0: towards a value ecology?

In the Web 2.0 communication and cultural environment, the way in which value is created is shifting from a hierarchical model, in which products are created, managed and distributed from the top down (with customers on the bottom), to a horizontal or peer-to-peer model, in which customers generate, distribute and reconfigure content in extensible systems managed by the platform provider. Economics researchers argue that we are in fact now entering a ‘social network economy’ in which ‘complex social networks play at least as significant a coordination role as price signals’ in consumer choice (Hartley et al. 2008, 169). That is, externalities such as consumers’ involvement in social networks, and those networks’ word of mouth recommendations, as well as organisations’ ability to engage with and enable the activities of active and dynamic networks, are becoming ever more central to organisations’ success, and to their value. In the past, ‘the dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions. Over the past decades, new perspectives have emerged that have a revised logic focused on intangible resources, the co-creation of value, and relationships’ (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 1). In the light of this, many organisations are shifting from thinking and communicating in the conventional ‘value chain’ model of communication, in which exchanges between firms and customers are one-way only — from the firm to the consumer — to the ‘value ecology’ model, in which consumers and their networks become active co-creators of the value of the product (Hearn and Pace 2006). [Introduction]