Search results

This paper proposes a value configuration approach for managing information technology in enterprises.

This conceptual research paper is concerned with industrial management and data systems from the perspective of value configurations. The value configuration approach consists of value shop, vale chain and value network.

The contingent approach to information technology management can be applied to value configurations.

Traditionally, data systems in industrial management have been supporting value chains. Recently, alternative value configurations have emerged. Specifically, the value shop and the value network are alternative value configurations. This paper makes an important contribution to insights into information systems depending on value configurations. The final section of this paper suggests that industrial management might expand from value chain management to value shop management, as firms become electronic businesses.

Despite the common understanding that business model (BM) innovation is of vital importance for securing competitive positioning in the market place, managers still seem to lack appropriate frameworks and tools which can support them in renewing and rejuvenating their company’s existing BM. The purpose of this paper is to develop a structural and comprehensive toolbox of available BM configurations, from which companies can choose, to innovate their BM upon, and to design an appropriate BM innovation framework which can facilitate them in re-designing, selecting, and implementing new BM configuration possibilities.

A structured literature review is conducted to identify all the relevant BM configurations. Then, a value driver analysis is performed to group these BM configurations into appropriate categories. Finally, an ontological classification scheme and a structural and workable process, i.e. a BM innovation framework, are inductively developed.

The paper systematically develops a list of 71 BM configurations and groups them into an ontological classification scheme according to five groups: Value Proposition, Value Segment, Value Configuration, Value Network, and Value Capture. The paper illustrates how the BM innovation framework, enabled by this ontological classification scheme, provides a platform for identifying BM innovation routes for companies, allowing managers to envisage radical, disruptive, and new-to-the-world BM configuration ideas, or apply existing configurations from other industrial settings in what may be deemed new-to-the-industry innovation.

The paper enriches the amount of potential BM configurations available for managers to choose from when innovating their BMs, and extends the analysis to five core BM configuration categories. Moreover, the BM innovation framework suggested highlights the strong relationships among the value drivers, thus presenting the opportunity for managers to assess potential conflicts or synergies between various value drivers, and to align the BM management process as a whole.

This paper aims to apply complexity theory tenets to deepen understanding, explanation and prediction of how configurations of national cultures and need motivations influence national entrepreneurial and innovation behavior and nations’ quality-of-life (QOL). Also, the study examines whether or not high national ethical behavior is sufficient for indicating nations high in quality-of-life.

Applying core tenets of complexity theory, the study constructs asymmetric, case-based (nations), explanations and predictive models of cultures’ consequences (via Schwartz’s seven value dimensions) and implicit need motivations (via McClelland’s three need motivations) indicating national entrepreneur and innovation activities and subsequent national quality-of-life and ethical behavior. The study includes testing configurational models empirically for predictive accuracy. The empirical examination is for a set of data for 24 nations in Asia, Europe, North and South America and the South Pacific.

The findings confirm the usefulness of applying complexity theory to learn how culture and motivation configurations support versus have negative consequences on nations’ entrepreneurship, innovation and human well-being. Nurturing of entrepreneur activities supports the nurturing of enterprise innovation activity and their joint occurrence indicates nations achieving high quality-of-life. The findings advance the perspective that different sets of cultural value configurations indicate nations high versus low in entrepreneur and innovation activities.

High entrepreneur activities without high innovation activity are insufficient for achieving high national quality-of-life. Achieving high ethical behavior supports high quality-of-life.

This study is one of the first to apply complexity theory tenets in the field of entrepreneurship research. The study here advances the perspective that case-based asymmetric modeling of recipes is necessary to explain and predict entrepreneur activities and outcomes rather than examining whether variable relationships are statistically significant from zero.

While innovative service systems may create substantial value for certain stakeholders, they often destroy value for others. This value paradox frequently leads to unsustainable service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of multiple theories to pinpoint and explain these value paradoxes, build a framework allowing potentially more sustainable value configuration of service systems and develop an agenda for future research. The framework is illustrated with examples from the hospitality industry.

The paper draws on prevalent theories and approaches, including service-dominant logic, business modeling, transaction cost economics, stakeholder theory, configuration theory and set theory, to develop a value configuration framework.

In a service system, the configuration of resources and relationships between these resources (i.e. the set of value propositions for various stakeholders of the system) determines which stakeholders will gain and which will lose and to what extent. For that reason, insight into the range of possible service configurations – or business models – will help decision makers consider the effects on various stakeholders, and, where possible, set their priorities right and make their businesses more sustainable. The research produces a rich research agenda.

Examples from hospitality allow an in-depth examination of a range of dynamic configurational and technological innovations, but some idiosyncratic characteristics of the context may impede the wider applicability of the conceptual framework. Future research could complement this work by studying other service sectors.

The paper aims to provide decision makers in the service industry with a conceptual tool to explore, diagnose and, if needed, adjust the value configuration of their service operations. In practice, this tool may help explicate the service system configuration, thus helping managers determine their organizations’ desired positioning in terms of value creation and destruction, and to choose strategic directions by adapting configurations.

Legislation and regulations are being adapted to various new service configurations. This paper attempts to – at least conceptually – distinguish different service configurations, allowing policy makers to identify the value trade-offs between stakeholders, including society at large.

Previous research focused primarily on value creation by innovative services and business models. Value creation for one stakeholder, however, could lead to value destruction for another. Taking this paradox into consideration may result in more open service ecosystems that explicitly consider sustainability and value implications in multiple dimensions and for a broader group of stakeholders.

Empirical studies of the shareholder valuation impact of firms’ international joint venture (IJV) participation have usually emphasized firm‐specific factors, but rarely extended their analysis to location‐specific factors. This is a crucial omission because the two sets of factors are interconnected vis‐a‐vis their influence on firms’ performance. Yet, previous work has neither identified how the two sets of factors complement each other nor investigated the effect of these complementarities on the shareholder value of firms who enter into IJVs. This study attempts to fill these gaps. It develops a typology of IJVs and then performs cluster analysis on a sample of 241 equity IJVs. Results indicate eight clusters in the data, including three clusters with positive shareholder value. In deriving support for its six hypotheses, the study highlights both value‐creating and value‐neutral configurations of firm‐ and location‐specific variables.

This chapter shows how to construct and test case-based macro models. The chapter makes use of national data to examine influences on quality-of-life of national cultures as complex wholes and entrepreneurship activities in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Germany, and the United States (the six focal nations) plus Denmark (a small-size, economically developed, nation). The study tests McClelland’s (1961) and more recent scholars’ proposition that some cultural configurations nurture entrepreneur startups, while other cultures are biased toward thwarting startups. The study applies complexity theory to develop and empirically test a general theory of cultures’, entrepreneurship’s, and innovation’s impact on quality-of-life across nations. Because culture represents a complex whole of attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavior, the study applies a set-theoretic approach to theory development and testing of alternative cultural configurations. Each of 28 economical developed and developing nations is scored for the level of the national cultures for each of six focal countries. The study selected for the study enables multi-way comparisons of culture-entrepreneurship-innovation-QOL among large- and small-sized developing and developed nations. The findings graphically present the complex national cultural configuration (x-axis) with entrepreneur nurture/thwart (y-axis) of the 28 nations compared to the six focal nations. The findings also include recognizing national cultures (e.g., Switzerland, the United States) nurturing entrepreneurial behavior versus other national cultures (e.g., Brazil and India) thwarting entrepreneurial behavior. The study concludes with a call to recognize the implicit shift in culturally implicit thinking and behavior necessary for advancing national platforms designed to successfully nurture entrepreneurship. Entrepreneur strategy implications include the observation that actions nurturing firm start-ups by nations low in entrepreneurship will unlikely to be successful without reducing such nations’ high levels of corruption.

This paper aims to explore value creation configurations pursued by suppliers in high-cost countries. The proposed value creation configuration approaches are seen as means for supplier firms to strengthen their competitiveness when faced with increasing global sourcing.

Survey data on supplier firms in Denmark are used in a hierarchical cluster analysis. The identified clusters are interpreted as expressions of different value creation configurations pursued by suppliers with regards to relations with their most important customers.

Three types of suppliers are identified: detached suppliers, which seek to create customer net benefits through low costs; technology-focused suppliers, which design value creation around benefits linked to being at the technological forefront; and integrated suppliers, which share characteristics with technology-focused suppliers, but also align closely with a relatively broader range of customer activities.

Limitations include the specificity of findings from one small, open economy with an extensive supplier base.

For managers in supplier companies, the research suggest value configurations can be used as strategic templates for further specialization and as way to assess and address value creation potential in customer firms.

Previous studies tend to overlook suppliers’ developments of value-creating activities to maintain customer relationships. The paper takes a supplier perspective to deepen the empirically based understanding of value creation configurations followed by high-cost country suppliers in the context of increasing global competition and production relocation. Theoretical implications as well as lessons formanagers in supplier firms of the identification of the different approaches to value creation configurations are presented.

This study identifies and characterizes configurations of generic business models for logistics service providers (LSPs) in the context of industrial additive manufacturing (AM). A literature-based framework of the AM service supply chain (SC) is developed to embed the generic configurations in their SC context.

Following an exploratory research design, 17 interviews were conducted with LSPs, LSPs' potential partners and customers for industrial AM services.

Six generic configurations are identified, the LSP as a Manufacturer, Landlord, Logistician, Connector, Agent and Consultant. The authors outline how these configurations differ in the required locations, partners and targeted customer segments.

The current discussion of reshoring and shorter, decentralized AM SCs confronts LSPs with novel challenges. This study offers guidance for managers of LSPs for designing business models for industrial AM and raises awareness for LSPs' resource and SC implications.

This study contributes to the scarce literature on AM business models for LSPs with in-depth empirical insights. Based on the six identified configurations, this study sets the ground for theorizing about the business models, in particular, the value creation, value proposition and mechanisms for value capture of the business models. In addition, this study suggests how the generic configurations fit the features of specific types of LSPs.

The aim of this chapter is to: (1) model culture as a configuration of multiple values, (2) identify different culture archetypes across the globe, and (3) empirically demonstrate heterogeneity in culture archetypes within and across 52 countries. We use Schwartz values from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the archetypal analysis (AA) method to identify diverse culture archetypes within and across countries. We find significant heterogeneity in culture values archetypes within countries and homogeneity across countries, calling into question the assumption of uniform national culture values in economics and other fields. We show how the heterogeneity in culture values across the globe can be represented with a small number of distinctive archetypes. The study could be extended to include a larger set of countries, and/or cover a broader range of theoretically grounded values than those available in the Schwartz values model in the WVS. Research and practice often assume cultural homogeneity within nations and cultural diversity across nations. Our finding of different culture archetypes within countries and similar archetypes across countries demonstrates the important role of culture sharing and exchange as a source of reducing cultural conflicts between nations and enhancing creativity and innovation through interaction and integration in novel ways. We examine culture as a configuration of multiple values, and use a novel AA method to capture heterogeneity in culture values within and across countries.

This paper aims to investigate how value drivers of internet medical business model affect value creation through a configurational approach. The internet medical business model (IMBM) is such a business model that integrates online and offline medical services with the driving force of internet technologies covering prediagnosis, in-diagnosis and postdiagnosis. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the support of national policies have boosted the development of internet health care. However, there are still many challenges in practice, such as the unclear innovation path, as well as difficulties in landing and profiting. Academic research has not yet provided sufficient theoretical insights. Therefore, to better explain and guide practice, it is urgent to clarify the innovation path and mechanism of value creation for IMBM.

Based on the sample of 58 internet medical firms in China, this paper adopts fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the configurational effects of IMBM’s value drivers on value creation.

Building on the business model canvas and the characteristics of internet health care, five value drivers of IMBM are identified, namely, functional value proposition, emotional value proposition, user involvement, resource capabilities and connection properties. And the five value drivers form three configurations, which are, respectively, labeled as resource-driven configuration, user-operated configuration and product-combined configuration. From the perspective of the integration of traditional and emerging theories, such as resource-based view, internet economics and value cocreation, each configuration leads to value creation and improves value results with different mechanisms behind it.

First, combined with the business model canvas and the characteristics of internet health care, this paper identifies five value drivers of IMBM, thus improving the relevant research on internet health care. Second, based on the configurational effects, this paper discusses the mechanism behind the configurational effects of IMBM’s value drivers on value creation, thus expanding relevant research on the value creation of business models. Third, applying fsQCA and combining the advantages of qualitative research and quantitative research, this paper adds to the configurations of IMBM’s value drivers that achieve high-value results.