Chapter 1 provides an overview of the current economic context for the global trend for economic quality and growth called the quality of life (QoL). Industries or businesses are progressively impacted by this trend in terms of the provision of a variety of improved QoL or wellbeing through service ecosystems. In addition, this chapter provides a rationalization of the vision for collective wellbeing toward economic quality and growth. The rationale is unfolded in terms of the provision of a conceptual model of collective wellbeing grounded in the logic of value co-creation, empowerment, and self-determined behaviors. This chapter provides the grounding mindset for the imperative elements and rationales for service providers to better design the customers (or stakeholders) empowerment processes for the co-creation of QoL wellbeing values, realizing collective wellbeing for economic quality and growth.
TopEconomic Quality And Growth
Quality of Life (QoL) has recently become a global trend according to the global sustainable development goals of the United Nations (UN, 2016). QoL refers to the general well-being of individuals and societies, and it concerns the quality of life at the level of individuals as well as at the level of societies. Further, QoL relates to the appraisal of human beings and their assessment of the external contextual environment (Barcaccia et al., 2013). Industries or businesses are increasingly affected by this trend because they observe the QoL being either created or disrupted in the current era of the service/experience economy. The contextual environment has an abundance of digital technologies that are used to facilitate the provision of a variety of improved well-beings. However, this might not be clearly manifested through the commonly used economic growth measure of GDP.
The Easterlin Paradox shows that growth in the form of economic prosperity is not connected with the growth of citizens’ life satisfaction (Pathak, 2018). Rather, GDP promotes the production and consumption of products and services and does not consider the negative phenomena (e.g., increased fuel consumption can lead to more traffic jams—and even more fuel consumption). The fact that GDP is not sufficient to measure the well-being of individuals and societies is evidenced clearly by the fact that it does not translate into people’s greater access to quality health care, education, transportation, environment, income distribution, general well-being, etc. In line with the global trend of economic quality and growth, it is imperative for industries and businesses to endorse the well-being conception to sustain themselves and avoid being disrupted over time.
Figure 1. Business perception of digital disruption threats
On the other hand, some research statistics (Figure 1) emphasize that digital technologies are highly believed to break down industry barriers and create new opportunities while destroying long-term, successful business models (Kane, 2018). We argue that these new opportunities are those well-being values being created in forms that could be effectively delivered to the targeted customers by using digital technologies to facilitate the value-delivery collaboration among the stakeholders. Meanwhile, customers become increasingly digital as a result of digital technologies. Businesses either compete to advance this customer behavior change concerning digital customer experience (DCE) or they constantly cope with it (Solis, 2015). That is, digital technologies can become part of the solution but also turn into part of the problem when helping businesses become more human in accord with the attempted well-being value to deliver.