Research and Development of new products and services used to be a secretive task performed in-house with the hope of bringing something to an unknowing market in time to recoup costs before it was inevitably copied by a competitor.
Now, R&D is open, crowd-sourced, and collaboratively designed in public. The market knows it's coming, and because they are co-developers, don't want a knock-off version from a competitor.
Eventually, brands will be known as mere catalysts, bringing sets of individual desires into reality as they embody and empower the collective thoughts of their customers.
