Value and Business Models
Value is the description of the ‘goodness’ of something; be it a person, an idea, a product, an activity or anything else. It is perceived and determined by the describer on the basis of “goodness-in-use” and therefore is relative to the context, experience and idiosyncrasies of the describer.
The concept of value has been discussed for over two thousand years with various nuanced meanings.
In recent years, researchers such as Holbrook (1994; 1999; 2006) have written extensively about value as a focal concept. Similarly, the American Marketing Association has also made value the central concept in its last two definitions of marketing, replacing the “product” as the object of exchange.
In a series of publications on the Service-Dominant (S-D) logic, Vargo and Lusch (2004: 2008) review the economic foundations that underpin how we understand value creation. In doing so, they suggest value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary. Therefore first, the provider cannot deliver value but only offer value propositions, and second, the customer is always a co-creator of value and therefore a customer’s value-creating processes and resources affect the success of a provider’s value proposition.
Given this orientation, and since the context of value creation is not within the provider’s control, business models for value co-creation present itself as a major challenge in designing and managing service systems.
Projects
- HALL - HAT Living Labs
- RCUK HARRIET - HAT Resource Integration and Enabling Tool: Smart Me versus Smart Things: The Development of a Personal Resource Planning (PRP) System through Human Interactions with Data Enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT)
- RCUK HAT - Hub-of-all-Things: Platform for Multi-sided Market powered by Internet-of-Things: Opportunities for New Economic Business Models
- RCUK NEMODE - New Economic Models of the Digital Economy
- Smart City & Smart Citizens - New Business and Economic Models of Urban Living
- ReadiPeDeX: Really Distributed Personal Data eXchange
- EPSRC S4T - Support Service Solutions: Strategy and Transition
- EPSRC Co-production of physical products and value co-creation