Metaverse meets the Experience Industry

Experiences have become an essential part of modern consumption. Experience industries such as tourism have seen extensive growth during the past decades. Experiential purchases have been found to increase the happiness of people more than material purchases as long as the basic needs of consumers are satisfied, providing the experiential advantage. As the interest in experiences among consumers grows, it becomes paramount for businesses and industries to provide experiences that people want to consume. These experiences increasingly include both offline and online components.

This project will develop novel innovation policies that facilitate and support cross-sectoral collaboration within the Experience Industry (El) and, thereby, increase the economic success - turnover, export income, GDP, and employment - of the tourism, events, arts and culture, gaming, and technology business that together make up the new experience industry. This is achieved by recognizing the interactions between different service providers within 'complex service products’ (CSPs) and the circularity of consumption of real-world and virtual El services within these CSPs over time - notably in ‘never-ending experiences’ of El.

The timing of this project is critical. We are on the cusp of moving from the digital transformation brought about by the internet to a metaverse transformation which is combining virtual and real-world experiences in completely new ways. This will change economic and social life - the ways in which we work, play, and communicate with one another - far more extensively than the internet over the past 20 years. It is essential for regional and national competitiveness and economic and social prosperity that innovation policies support, in the right way(s), this transformation.