Prosumers: The Emerging Stakeholder in the Future of Tech

By Christoph Schell

About 20 years ago in Europe, I began to notice a trend: Businesspeople shifting from selecting flashier company cars towards ones that could double as personal, practical vehicles for their families. Manufacturers then caught on and began to combine luxury with practicality. Today, we’re seeing a similar shift in technology as people seek technology designed for personal-professional flexibility that can also deliver enterprise-level security, workflows and experiences. These newly empowered customers are known as “prosumers.”

Originally coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1980 book “The Third Wave” to describe the active role consumers would play in the commercialization of goods, the term prosumer stems from the words producer and consumer. Others define prosumers as a combination of professional users and consumers. Both definitions imply the same concept: the increasing ability of consumers to inject individuality into not just how technology is used but how it’s designed from the start. Now, technology is being used more fluidly than ever before, presenting a significant opportunity for vendors to pull capabilities across consumer and commercial tools.

Driving Enterprise-Grade Capabilities

The rise of prosumers is not simply an opportunity for vendors to capture and commodify an untapped customer segment; it’s an opportunity to put real, tangible and human-driven insight at the core of how we design technology.

In the past, providing value meant shifting back and forth between the professional and consumer’s point of view. Because those customer segments have blended, it becomes easier to understand the nuanced needs of the entirety of the individual. Additionally, a shift from one-time transactional sales towards outcomes-based business models allows vendors to get closer to customers, more nimbly adjust service offerings and provide sharper value propositions across all segments.

During the first wave of workplace disruption last year, business leaders faced a dual challenge: drive employee engagement in work-from-home environments with technology that mirrored that of the office while reducing costs. In fact, a recent survey found that scaling up tech capabilities is the top priority for 53% of CTOs in the new hybrid workplace. What’s more, using personal devices for professional purposes, or bring-your-own-device (BYOD), continues to accelerate, with improved mobility and greater employee satisfaction driving the trend. For hybrid work, a single device and solutions can serve the needs of two different environments. For example: print workflows that help differentiate between pages printed for personal use and pages printed for work to determine what costs should be reimbursed by employers. 

Meanwhile, the ability to use data to create hyper-customized value propositions for consumers will also be crucial. The concepts of prosumer and data-driven insights should work in tandem.

Prosumers in Every Industry

We must remember that prosumers also are in all fields, including education, retail, the public sector, digital manufacturing and more. For instance, as digital manufacturing accelerates, a lot of design and prototyping jobs can actually be done from home because 3D printers can read digital files. Even prior to the pandemic, entire factory workflows had been setup using “digital twins.” Therefore, software and how it is designed for a workforce at home—such as HP’s ZCentral Remote Boost—is becoming more important because it allows flexibility for users to work from almost any endpoint.

In education, there is another massive opportunity to engage with prosumers. Take the rise of virtual learning last year. Buying a child’s first PC became an essential task for a large emerging segment of customers. Never before have parents needed to consider battery life, processor speed and webcam quality for a 10-year-old. But by recognizing the potential of these customers as co-designers of future PCs, we can create extremely tailored products that meet a diverse range of preferences. I also predict that the parents and grandparents who’ve recently witnessed the power of virtual learning for their families will soon consider virtual classes and digital upskilling themselves. This next generation of older digital learners will have an immense impact on the future of EdTech design.

Prosumers are demonstrating their influence not only in the technology they choose to buy but, importantly, in the devices they choose not to buy. Companies must use insights from digital interactions to understand end users’ needs, moment to moment.

The legacy and ideas of great thinkers like Toffler live on because they tap into a fundamental aspect of human nature: the drive to constantly improve ourselves and our world. Prosumers have the power to set the tech agenda for the next decade. And we, as an industry, not only have an opportunity, but an obligation, to fully embrace this influential segment in how we design and commercialize our tech.

Originally published in Innovation: http://bit.ly/3srzlhd