De Hoven is a nursery home for elderly people in the north of the Netherlands . The mission of the Hoven is to facilitate elderly people to live their lifes as they choose to live it and make it as pleasant and meaningful as possible and to offer services that make life more convenient. Up till today the characteristics of large scale nursery homes are large rooms of 30 people, lack of privacy, strongly controlled living environment which is efficiency and economically driven. De Hoven is redesigning their premises on the basis of small scale living in decentralised units of 6 people as a family unit. Guests for instance take care of their own washing and cooking.The following research questions are postulated;

PhD research by drs. Anna Snel.   Promotor prof.dr.ir. R. Maes, Faculty of Economics & Econometrics (FEE) Universiteit van Amsterdam.

A lot is being written and said about the transformation from a service oriented economy to a new kind of economy. Books about this transition, be it from a service economy to an attention economy, experience economy, dream society or emotion economy, are instant bestsellers. Companies all of a sudden want to build communities of clients, want to stage customer experiences, want to improve the user experience on their website, want to experientialize the offices to satisfy and retain employees, want to transform their brand into an experience etc. By doing things like these, companies try to differentiate themselves from their competition, since allegedly it is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate oneself on the sole basis of quality of service.

Keywords: Experiences, Services, Communicative deep self-steering, Knowingness, Holonics & integral visions, Authentic business, Fields of knowledge, Learning and development.