Commodity/product/service
From eg
The commodity/product/service transitions was clearly identified by Hawken, Lovins, Lovins in Natural Capitalism, 1999. It built on a very prevalent view that commodities didn't exist except insofar as contracts on some market define them, even when the deliverable appears to be physical.
HLL's thesis was that business everywhere had to move from commodity and product to service thinking: taking full responsibility for all aspects of extraction, production and final disposal. That the radical transparency imposed by ICT and mass peer review online, and other factors inherent to global competition, forced such a change.
One implication is that new negative commodities such as in emissions trading would come into existence but ultimately also compete qualitatively once markets were better defined, essentially becoming varied emissions abatement products that had their own characteristics (and marketing advantages) and ultimately services that dealt not only with emissions quantitatively but undid other harms of consumption.
A closely related argument is that of Pine & Gilmore that service/experience/transformation progression enables companies to charge more for value added.
