What’s authenticity got to do with innovation? 

This video doesn’t ask or answer that question. But it makes it clear that something highly relevant to both of these issues is heading our way and it’s on a collision course with the way we think about everything.

What’s amazing, is that this talk is from 2004 and yet most of its implications are still in the future. The value that we place upon personal experience is still something which is missing from the way almost all marketing is done. This video is implying that ‘reality is coming to the way business communicates’. It’s six years later, and we’re still waiting. Maybe the problems caused by inauthenticity just haven’t got bad enough yet.

Here is his biography, from his website:

B. JOSEPH PINE II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike.

He is co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings.

Mr. Pine and his partner James H. Gilmore (it’s a pdf of his bio) most recently wrote Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Harvard Business Press, 2007), which recognizes that in a world of increasingly paid-for experiences, people no longer accept the fake from the phony, but want the real from the genuine.

This book, named one of the top ten business books of the year by Amazon.com and featured in a cover story in TIME Magazine on “10 Ideas that are changing the world”, provides a way of thinking about authenticity in business plus a set of tools and techniques for rendering authenticity in any company.

It follows the best-selling The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), which demonstrates how goods and services are no longer enough; what companies must offer today are experiences – memorable events that engage each customer in an inherently personal way.

Published in twelve languages and named one of the 100 best business books of all time by 800ceoread, The Experience Economy shows how businesses should embrace theatre as an operating model to stage unique experiences.

Mr. Pine also wrote the award-winning Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 1993).

It details the shift companies are making from mass producing standardized offerings to mass customizing goods and services that efficiently fulfill the wants and needs of individual customers.

The Financial Times chose the book as one the seven best business books of 1993.

He and his partner followed this up by editing a collection of Harvard Business Review articles entitled Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

Mr. Pine has written numerous articles for the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive, Worldlink, CIO, Strategy & Leadership, and the IBM Systems Journal, among many others.

Prior to beginning his writing and speaking activities, Mr. Pine held a number of technical and managerial positions with IBM.

One of his many assignments was key to the effective launch of the Application System/400 computer system, for which he managed a team that brought customers and business partners directly into the development process of the system.

Because of this innovative activity, customer needs were met more exactly and quality was significantly enhanced – factors that contributed greatly to IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, facility winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1990.

Mr. Pine is frequently quoted in such places as Forbes, The New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, USA TODAY, Investor’s Business Daily, ABC News, Good Morning America, Fortune, Business Week, and Industry Week.

In his speaking and teaching activities, Mr. Pine has addressed the World Economic Forum, is a Visiting Scholar with the MIT Design Lab, and he and his partner were the Dean Helen LeBaron Hilton Endowed Co-Chairs with the College of Family and Consumer Sciences at Iowa State University for 2002-3.

Mr. Pine has also taught at Penn State, Duke Corporate Education, the University of Minnesota, UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, and the Harvard Design School.

He also serves on the editorial boards of Strategy & Leadership and Strategic Direction, is honorary editor of The International Journal of Mass Customization, is a member of the Wise Committee for the Youth Imagination Initiative in Extremadura, Spain, and is a Senior Fellow with both the Design Futures Council and the European Centre for the Experience Economy, which he co-founded.