ABSTRACT
The present industrial economy, which has developed over the past 200 years in today's industrialised countries, is based on the optimisation of the production process in order to reduce unit costs and thus overcome the scarcity of goods of all kinds, from food to shelter to durable goods, which was the norm 200 years ago. A service economy is fundamentally different from the industrial economy in that its main objective is to maintain or increase total wealth and welfare over long periods of time. The holistic vision of a sustainable society was already at the base of the movement that coined the English term 'sustainability' in the early 1970s: the Woodlands Conferences in Houston, TX, and the related Mitchell Prize Competition. The consumer-turned-user gains a high flexibility in the utilisation of goods as well as guaranteed satisfaction at a guaranteed cost per unit of service.
