The Progress Economy

to be sharpened up – but an OK starter for ten…

0. address blind-spots of current value model

1. Adopting a progress-first perspective ⇒ fixing innovation, sales, and growth problems

By prioritising progress over chasing hard to define value, we unlock powerful levers and tools that boost sales success and ignite (systematic) innovation.

Traditional views of value – while historically effective – are increasingly constraining growth and derailing innovation. Value is difficult to define and even harder to pursue directly. It’s time to reimagine value itself.

→ re-imagining value

The Progress Economy adopts a progress-forward rather than value-first lens. Everyone is striving to reach a more desired state across all aspects of life. That is progress.

Value emerges from progress – more specifically, from a set of progress comparisons. At the progress origin, there is no emerged value, only potential value. Maximum value is realised when the Seeker reaches their progress sought. Along the way, value surfaces in two forms: as a trailing indicator of progress reached compared to progress sought, and as a forward-looking assessment of progress potential against progress sought.

Chasing value puts the cart before the horse. The smarter strategy is to focus on understanding, enabling, and improving progress.

This subtle shift changes everything – and reveals the tools to solve our innovation, sales, and growth challenges.

2. Viewing progress as a state ⇒ better insights into desires, starting points, and achievements

Progress states capture necessary details, insights, waypoints and provide the language to discuss a seeker’s progress journey; essential understandings for improving innovation and sales.

If we accept that a progress-forward lens better explains and drives the world, then viewing progress as a state gives us sharper insights into desires (progress sought), starting points (progress origin), and achievements (progress reached).

Each progress state has three equally important aspects:

• Functional (e.g., able to speak Mandarin),
• Non-functional (e.g., fast, personally rewarding),
• Contextual (e.g., can’t attend lessons at fixed times).

Together, these define a snapshot of progress at any point in time. We can name these points to deepen understanding:

• progress sought – the Seeker’s more desired state
• progress origin – their unique starting point (and where a proposition aims to help from)
• progress offered – the state a proposition offers to help reach
• progress reached / potential – Seeker’s evolving judgement of current or possible progress

This structure enables a full view of progress journeys—and with it, a clearer grasp of innovation. It gives language and insight to unlock Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive innovation, Blue Ocean Strategy, Drucker’s “innovate or die,” and more.

3. Recognising progress as a verb ⇒ deeper understanding of how progress is made and hindered

Understanding how progress is attempted – that a seeker tries to move from their individual progress origin to their progress sought through a series of resource integrations – is essential for innovation and sales: what are they lacking? what do they do? how can you help?

Understanding how progress is attempted– that a Seeker moves from their unique progress origin toward their progress sought through a series of resource integrations – is critical for innovation and sales. What are they lacking? What do they try? How can you help?

Progress, as a verb, is the act of moving toward a more desirable state. It happens through progress-making activities, each involving the integration of one or more resources.

Ideally, a Seeker progresses from their origin to their sought state. But they may lack essential capabilities to do so —time, skills, tools, knowledge, or physical capacity; or marketing, accounting, R&D etc..

They may still attempt progress, which can generate new resources (sometimes sharable with others). Or, they may engage supplementary capabilities, carried by resources, offered by a progress Helper. In doing so, they often compromise—achieving the progress offered by the proposition rather than their original progress sought.

These propositions introduce five additional hurdles to progress—such as adoptability, resistance, or inequitable exchange—that must be understood and addressed.

4. Framing value as a set of progress comparisons ⇒ achieving a clearer, actionalbe, view of value

Framing value as a set of progress comparisons—often subjective—resolves many of the ambiguities that surround traditional value thinking. Influencing these comparisons, both in magnitude and perceived objectivity, is a powerful lever for sales and innovation.

In a progress-forward view, value arises from comparisons such as:

• Potential value: How close can I get to my progress sought—alone or with a specific proposition?
• Emerged value: How much progress have I made versus what I expected?
• Recognised value: Is the progress made meaningful or worthwhile to me?

These comparisons are made primarily by the Seeker – before, during, and after progress attempts. They are phenomenological: deeply personal, often subjective, and shaped by prior experience and present context.

A key role of progress Helpers is to shift these comparisons toward more objective grounds, while improving the Seeker’s overall experience.

At times, Helpers make these comparisons themselves – deciding whether to offer or withdraw access to their supplementary resources based on whether sufficient progress can be, or is being, made.

5. Recognising that, to be meaningful, emerged value must be acknowledged

Influencing the seeker’s value recognition frequency, and/or amounts of recognition at any one time, is a lever for innovation and sales.

While value emerges through progress, it becomes meaningful only when it is recognised by the progress Seeker—a process not unlike revenue recognition in financial contexts.

Consider a Seeker aiming to travel 100km. If they stop after 80km on day one, then 80 units of value have technically emerged. That only holds meaning if the final 20km can be completed the next day—i.e., if progress continues. If arrival was required on day one, the same 80km holds no meaningful value—because the progress sought wasn’t achieved in time.

The ability to influence how frequently, and how much, value is recognised at each point in time is a lever for both innovation and sales. Methodologies like Agile or subscription-based services exemplify how faster or more frequent value recognition can create greater engagement and sustained momentum.

6. Eliminating (marketing) myopia ⇒ from goods vs. services to goods enable service distribution

Goods enable service to be transported to where/when needed. By eliminating the unhelpful goods vs. services debate of our traditional perspectives, we open up our perspective on potential solutions – unlocking a powerful lever for innovation and sales.

It’s time to leave behind Levitt’s marketing myopia.

Traditional thinking often casts services as inferior to goods—intangible, inconsistent, dependent on customer participation, inseparable from consumption, and lacking inventory. That framing creates a blind spot.

In the Progress Economy, that distinction dissolves. There’s no meaningful difference between experiencing your favorite band live (a service—the real-time application of skills and knowledge for benefit) and hearing them via a streaming platform, CD, or vinyl (goods). Goods are simply a means of freezing service so it can be distributed across time and space. When a Seeker integrates that resource—pressing play, picking up a tool—the service is unfrozen.

This framing widens the solution space. We stop asking “is this a product or a service?” and start designing progress-enabling propositions that fit the context. It’s a subtle shift, but one that removes constraints and opens the door to more adaptable, more resonant innovation.

7. Identifying clear progress hurdles ⇒ working to reduce them

Reducing one or more of the six progress hurdles is a lever for innovation and sales – though hurdles may be interlinked: reducing one may increase another

Progress is rarely straightforward. Seekers face real hurdles when trying to move from origin to progress sought. Identifying and reducing these hurdles is a powerful lever for innovation and sales—though it’s important to note that many hurdles are interlinked, and reducing one may inadvertently raise another.

The foundational hurdle is a lack of capability—whether time, skill, knowledge, physical capability, tools, etc. Since progress depends on integrating such resources, the absence of them can prevent a Seeker from even attempting progress. The higher the hurdle, the lower the likelihood of an attempt.

Yet this isn’t a hard barrier. Some Seekers will still try—driven by urgency, curiosity, or determination. If successful, they may even generate new resources they can offer to others. More commonly, however, a Seeker turns to an existing progress proposition—a bundle of supplementary resources designed to help.

But propositions themselves introduce five additional progress hurdles:

• Adoptability – How easily can the proposition be understood, trialed, and adopted? (Rogers’ diffusion of innovation applies here.)
• Resistance – What frictions or doubts prevent adoption that aren’t covered by traditional adoption theory?
• Lack of Confidence – Does the Seeker trust the proposition or provider? (Where branding, reputation, and social proof play a role.)
• Misalignment on the Continuum – Is the proposition enabling progress where the Seeker wants relief? Or vice versa?
• Equitable Exchange – Does the Seeker feel the required effort or trade-offs outweigh the perceived benefit—even if the value is there?

Each of these hurdles can block or slow a Seeker’s journey. The Progress Economy provides a framework to systematically identify and reduce them. But caution is needed: for example, lowering the resource requirement might unintentionally raise the perception of inequitable exchange.

Understanding these interdependencies—and designing with them in mind—is key to building more resonant, adoptable, and scalable propositions.

8. ENHANCING PROGRESS ⇒ DESIGNING PROPOSITIONS THAT EFFECTIVELY SUPPORT PROGRESS

Creating new propositions—or evolving existing ones—by improving their progress-making activities or resource mix is a powerful lever for innovation.

Progress attempts and their associated hurdles naturally lead us to progress propositions: offers made by Progress Helpers to support a Seeker in making progress. These propositions consist of two bundled elements of supplementary resources:

1. A proposed set of progress-making activities – often delivered as instructions, manuals, guided workflows, recipes, or embedded system logic.
2. A tailored progress resource mix, which may include:
   • Employees (including AI-based agents)
   • Systems
   • Data
   • Goods
   • Physical tools or assets
   • Locations or environments

Improving a proposition—so that it helps the Seeker make better progress or make progress better—is the very definition of innovation. Aligning that improved proposition with the Seeker’s specific progress journey? That’s effective sales.

The opportunity lies not just in designing a proposition that works, but one that resonates—that fits seamlessly into the Seeker’s reality, clears relevant hurdles, and supports progress in a meaningful, achievable, and recognisable way.

9. Dealing with changing attitudes ⇒ Gliding across the progress continuum

Sliding a proposition along the progress proposition continuum – in either direction – is a lever for innovation and sales

Some Seekers want to be relieved; others want to be enabled. And their position on the continuum between these two modes can shift over time or vary by context.

Progress propositions, by design, also fall somewhere along this continuum. Where a proposition sits provides insight into both its resource mix and the non-functional progress it supports.

This continuum is one of the Progress Economy’s practical tools. It gives us a way to explore how propositions can adapt to evolving seeker attitudes.

Innovation, in this context, is about gliding along the continuum—and doing so in either direction. For example, servitisation represents a shift toward the relieving end and is often cited in the “move to a service economy.” But there’s equal opportunity to innovate by shifting toward more enabling propositions—especially where Seekers are seeking autonomy, mastery, or self-actualisation.

10. Making the world go round ⇒ exchanging service, equitably

Thinking in terms of equitable effort exchange opens up new possibilities for innovative business models—subscription, subsidised, freemium, and beyond.

One of the more initially challenging aspects of The Progress Economy is moving away from the traditional idea of a “value exchange” (e.g. cash for product) toward the view that service exchange—the application of skills and knowledge for the benefit of others—is what actually drives economic activity.

Most often, this service exchange is indirect, occurring through transitive exchanges across multiple parties. It is mediated by mechanisms we know as service credits—of which money is one widely adopted implementation.

This begins with a simple truth: we are all progress seekers, yet the resources required to make progress are not equally distributed. So we specialise, and we trade help.

This reframing explains a lot:

• Why actors are incentivised to offer progress propositions—to earn service credits.
• Why some actors actively create new resources to offer—helper-driven innovation.
• Why exclusivity (via patents, copyright, etc.) becomes strategically valuable—it protects the helper’s service advantage.
• What pricing signals—an estimate of the effort expected in exchange for the effort offered (often calculated as effort × iterations).
• Why the inequitable exchange hurdle arises—when a Seeker feels the effort required to acquire the needed service credits (elsewhere) exceeds the value of the Helper’s offer.

This perspective also unlocks new business model innovations. Subscriptions, subsidised access, freemium tiers—they are all mechanisms for balancing perceived effort across exchanges and broadening access to progress support.