In 2018, China’s smart-technology sector entered a period of rapid renewal. Products linked to smart cities, smart communities, intelligent buildings, and connected homes began appearing everywhere, as if they had sprung up overnight. Major companies moved quickly, using new forms of experience design and resource integration to explore the smart industry more deeply and to offer consumers a way of life described as safer, healthier, more convenient, and more beautiful.
This wave of internet-driven change has done more than push traditional industries toward intelligent transformation. It has also connected ordinary people on a broader scale. By making use of the convenience of networks, society is redefining how human beings obtain information value, create information value, and understand higher forms of personal value.
Yet in the past two years, as connected intelligence has exerted a strong influence on traditional sectors, many industries have fallen into the same misunderstanding when designing “smart living” models: never leaving home, just moving a finger. Some have gone even further, treating the so-called “lazy era” as the only proof of an efficient life.
This is a narrow reading of technological progress. As traditional industries push aggressively into smart transformation, they often overlook the real spirit of the connected age: connected technology is the primary driving force of a better future life. In the present stage of social change, internet and IoT technologies should not merely make daily life more convenient. More importantly, they should improve the quality of life by enabling people to work and live with greater energy and efficiency. While raising productivity, technology should also give residents more time and space to enjoy a comfortable, meaningful life.
Only by “going out” can society “bring in” new value. Information exchange creates value. Collective intelligence drives development. Shared prosperity becomes possible when people are not isolated by technology but connected through it.
When convenience becomes a cage
The current direction of connected technology is beginning to drift. While technology develops, it can also restrict the steps people take forward and close off the imagination that drives innovation. The real soul of the internet’s contribution to a better life should be found in a different set of questions: How can technology shorten the distance between people? How can it increase trust? How can it improve the value of communication? How can it expand the channels through which effective information spreads? How can it help shape a harmonious, positive social and cultural consciousness?
All innovation should answer the needs of social development. It should not blindly produce intelligent devices that limit people’s desire and ability to go outside, meet others, and participate in the world.
A simple example can be seen in a common smart-industry strategy model promoted in recent years:
In this model, the company treats consumer business, wireless broadband, and smart-home products as major strategic businesses for its terminal division. The core task of the product line is to create a fully connected solution covering people, cars, and homes. Its strategic slogan promises consumers a richer smart-connection experience. Its 2018 corporate goal was to introduce this intelligent ecosystem into a full range of smart household appliances and sell them through multiple retail experience stores across the country.
At first glance, this appears to be a typical strategy of platform building, resource integration, and rule setting. In essence, however, it is also a way to achieve a strong implantation of brand value. In this game of “smart connection” and “mutual benefit,” consumers are placed in a passive position. The ecosystem wraps consumers tightly at the center and guides them toward an all-around lifestyle of never leaving home, just moving a finger—convenient, comfortable, and intelligent.
The company occupies the dominant position in this revolution of “smart technology changing life.” Consumers, meanwhile, become the targets of profit competition. The public does not necessarily gain a stronger sense of self-worth from this smart transformation. Instead, people may be quietly deprived of the freedom to “go out.” Like frogs slowly heated in warm water, consumers risk gradually losing the right and ability to create value themselves.
Information exchange is where value begins
In discussions about social change, one view has become increasingly clear: connected technology should help effective information exchange play a positive guiding role in everyday life. This is the way to open up a genuinely new form of smart living.
In fact, many positive changes are already taking place around us. Open-source internet projects such as GitHub and Gitee, as well as knowledge-sharing platforms such as Zhihu and Douban, show how people can create, exchange, and amplify value through networks.
On this basis, a “talent value logic deduction” can be used to examine the relationship among four factors: personal sphere of influence, the value of mental labor, the value of physical labor, and self-worth. The key finding is that the development of connected technology has changed the old one-to-one model of labor production.
This conclusion points to more than a technical shift. It also exposes problems in the way urban talent is currently organized. In the future, the working forms of city residents will increasingly depend on efficient, high-value information matching. The more accurately people, needs, skills, and opportunities are connected, the more social value can be created.
2018 China “Internet+” Digital Economy Summit
From this perspective, enterprises in the age of connected innovation should pay greater attention to helping residents build orderly living spaces. They should use connected technology to create effective channels for high-energy information matching, guiding people into a more orderly and valuable internet era. This would improve the atmosphere of social and cultural communication and help residents build a smarter and better future.
What transformation should mean for real estate
The innovation and transformation of real estate companies should not be invented out of nothing. Companies need to think carefully about how to use existing resources to help consumers improve their self-worth while building efficient matching channels between users and enterprises. Over time, this can guide existing regional land blocks toward becoming active industrial areas with their own momentum.
For example, many real estate developers now treat better residential services as the core competitiveness of their products. The pursuit of service quality is indeed an important expression of residents’ value needs at the present stage of society. But simply improving service quality cannot lead a company into a long-term blue-ocean strategy.
Better services matter, but they are also easy to imitate and replicate. Competition for users will eventually return to a red-ocean model driven by capital consumption. The real question is how to use connected technology to guide residents in forming a self-sustaining model of “spatial value.” This is the only path toward a blue-ocean strategy that cannot be easily copied.
Here, a new concept can be introduced: “community spatial value theory”. It refers to the creation of a community spatial environment that connects residents in a predictable and purposeful way. Through an efficient platform for information exchange, residents gradually enhance their own value, and the region eventually develops a distinctive value form of its own.
China is using technological innovation as a force capable of moving the world, guiding its people toward prosperity and rejuvenation.
When companies formulate smart-product strategies, they should spend more time thinking about how to rebuild trust between people. Under reasonable constraints and moral governance, they should open practical channels of communication for users, encourage the formation of residents’ self-value awareness, and promote the emergence of regional value industries.
The foundation of a mutually beneficial smart industry is not cooperation between enterprises driven purely by absolute profit. It is the close connection between users, and between people who can create value together.