Abstract

Florian Urmetzer from IfM Cambridge Service Alliance would like to introduce his research and thought about value creation and exchange in service ecosystems. The seminar focuses on building a framework to help solve a factual problem described by companies. The problem is based on lack of ability to understand the complete value exchange between partners in business ecosystems (focus on the direct and indirect value capture and creation between key stake holders). By addressing the demand from practitioners we are not only answering the call of practitioners for a deeper understanding of value, however we are answering as well academic calls to understand value e.g. (Lepak et al. 2007).

The research question guiding the research was “what are different types of value being created within an ecosystem and captured by its customers?” The defined framework has helped managers to understand and evaluate the direct and indirect value exchanged between businesses in ecosystems. The most valuable way of understanding the value exchanged was by first understanding the ecosystem as a whole and then focusing onto one key partner within the ecosystem to understand the direct value created and captured between them. By making the managers think along direct and indirect value, discussing, collecting, visualising the different value types, they were enabled to understand the value proposition they are creating for the ecosystem, they are capturing from the ecosystem and the value proposition partners are creating and capturing. This has helped strategy formulation as well as defining the value exchange in ongoing projects in depth and logical.