In an excellent new book, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, authors C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy describe the consumer's new role: "from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active." In the bottom-up economy, presuming you know what the customer wants is the ultimate error. Prahalad and Ramaswamy instead call for "co-creation of value": The successful products and services from now on will be those developed jointly -- company and customer working hand in hand.

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