The digital world will compel companies to provide us all with highly personalised services which will fit exactly with the ways in which we choose to live our lives in the future. This is the conclusion of Professor Irene Ng, Professor of Marketing and Service Systems in her new article for the University of Warwick’s Knowledge Centre.

Professor Ng, Head of Service Systems and Marketing and Director of WMG’s International Institute for Product and Service Innovation (IIPSI), has released the article on ‘Digital Darwinism’ to coincide with the release of her new book on the subject, Value & Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy.

Professor Ng uses the popular and occasionally controversial subject of digital music to explain how new markets are created to satisfy our individual needs within particular contexts:

Today, digitisation allows us to enjoy music without owning a record or CD. With digitisation, music can now sit at ‘virtual’ locations such as the cloud, accessible through a device such as your computer or your mobile phone with Internet connection. By streaming the music through our devices from these locations, music is made available for us to listen to wherever and whenever we want it, i.e. in context, which is when the need is most salient, and on demand.

"Crucially, we can also pay for the music when we want or need it, rather than having to buy before or after the need arises; this is where future markets could be formed - where there are opportunities for a convergence of buy and use. Digitisation enables opportunities for traditional offerings to become a resource in context, reducing time between acquiring a resource and using a resource, thus expanding demand for it.”

Professor Ng concludes that success may come from finding new economic models for value creation, leaving firms with the option to either evolve or become extinct in the digital world.

Professor Ng’s article is available to view on the Knowledge Centre website. The Kindle version of ‘Value & Worth’ is now available to download from Amazon. Print editions are scheduled for release in September 2013. For further details, please visit: http://www.valueandmarkets.com/