Deep Personalization

More people reject mass product and service offerings, including education, engaging in do-it-yourself projects.

Real World Application

The intersection of trends: Strong Opinions, Strongly Held and Smart Networking with impact areas: Markets and Institutions illustrates the narrative of deep personalization.

Deep personalization tells a different story of extreme diversity in the context of the market and institutions—how people express their strong opinions and distinct identity in their processes of creating and exchanging value. Deep personalization reflects the growing tendency for people to reject mass offerings (including education, health, as well as consumer products and services) and co-create experiences that are meaningful to them. Deep personalization implies a fundamentally new relationship among product and service providers and their beneficiaries.

The rise of do-it-yourself desires and practices is a key part of the deep personalization story. The growth of toolkits, how-to web logs and magazines Make, and digital resource commons like open courseware and other knowledge bases will continue to supply individuals with the means for self-expression and co-creation.

Successful institutions will recognize the need to serve as platforms that support engaged do-it-yourself behavior. Author Chris Anderson describes in The Long Tail how niche markets that cater to deeply personal and distinct desires are economically viable. Consider the self-organizing markets and groups forming daily on eBay, Amazon, and MySpace. Decreasing coordination costs of the Internet make it cost-effective to connect small groups with shared interests.

In education, new brain research and other studies on how people learn will drive more personalized learning and forms of participatory pedagogy as engaged networkers co-create their learning experiences.
People make their own worlds
Extending the trend toward choice and customization in everything from media and appliances to food, health, and education, people are becoming more active participants in creating their own worlds, whether it means do-it-yourself home projects, peer-to-peer media exchanges, or open-source collaboration. The result: a much more personalized world.


Personalized learning focuses on the craft of teaching
Personalized learning plans will leverage new media, brain research, and school structures to create differentiated learning experiences based on individual needs. Interactive and collaborative digital spaces, such as wikis, will provide shared learning portfolios where students, educators, parents, and other learning stakeholders can perform assessments and real-time interventions. New classroom approaches will be controversial for many teachers because they require “unlearning” many basic assumptions about the nature of teaching. Unions may resist the diversification of educator roles or embrace it as an opportunity to be real leaders of change.


Media become personal and collaborative
As economic identity shifts from consumer to creative producer, digital technology will turn the world of media into a very personal world. Increasingly, people will take advantage of simple tools and a worldwide platform to express themselves in everything from blogs (personal Web pages) and wikimedia (Web pages that can be edited by anyone) to podcasting (sharing audio or video files for downloading to iPods), machinima (remixed animated computer games) and mashups (video, music, or graphic media that are re-mixed). The social nature of these tools will encourage sharing, appropriating, and reinventing others’ inventions in a rapid stream of collaborative innovation. The impacts of this innovation will run deep in our social and economic systems.