Journal of Creating Value

The purpose of this article is fourfold.

The first is to get practitioners and academics understand the value of a value destruction focus. How can it improve value creation? This is a brand new area that has not hitherto received much attention.

The second is to get practitioners to use this thinking more actively in building their strategy, operational thinking, compliance thought process and regulatory and political (environmental and external) thinking.

The third is to open up a new area of research for academics who work on various subjects where value creation is a goal or is important. Perhaps they can analyse past failures and come up with recipes for greater value creation and a process for analysis before committing to a path of action or they can find better processes for looking at, designing, developing or monitoring strategy, new products and services, new technologies and new operational thinking. What new tools can be developed to analyse or mitigate value destruction or simply foresee these? This should also open a debate and papers in Journal of Creating Value and perhaps lead to a special issue. What techniques can be used to change managerial mind-sets.

Finally and fourth, the aim is to get away from reactive and ‘after-the-fact’ analysis to proactive value creation and reduce value destruction and learn from value destruction potential.

This article focuses on the value innovation prompted by Artificial Intelligence (AI). By shifting the attention from innovation as a new outcome to innovating as something that people do (i.e., a practice) to co-create value, this article addresses how IBM Watson prompts new service provisions and the emergence of new interactions between humans and non-humans. The research allows for detecting how multiple actors connect, interact, learn and discover new ways to do things, serve others better and co-create value through AI. A fresh approach is offered to explore the role of AI to foster networking and knowing practices for value creating and innovating.

With digitalization, new type of firms—the so-called business platforms—emerged as a central hub in two-sided markets. As business platforms do not ‘produce’ products or services, they represent a new model of value creation that raises the question about the core nature of a firm in the twenty-first century, when ‘data is the new oil’. At the end of the twentieth century, the concept of ‘value chains, value shops and value networks’ represented the latest development about internal value creation in a firm, but lacked any discussion about information technology (IT) or even ‘data as raw material’. This digital approach to monetarize aggregated data sets as internal core function of a firm needs more clarification, as value creation ‘without production’ is a shift of paradigm. This article starts with the concept of ‘value chains, value shops and value networks’, extends this to current IT and includes business platforms within an integrated framework of internal value creation in a firm. Based on this framework and the current development of leading-edge artificial intelligence (AI), this framework is applied to forecast the development towards ‘AI-enabled data platforms’, which are not covered by traditional economic theories. This article calls for more research to clarify the impact of such data-based business models compared to production-based models.

Co-creation is said to take place in a variety of domains when two or more actors interact to create value. The topic of brand co-creation has been in the literature for 15 years. During this time, a multitude of concepts, constructs and behaviours about co-creation have been presented in the marketing literature. The result is a fragmented research area with little underlying consensus about how co-creation occurs between consumers and brands. The purpose of this article is to propose a brand co-creation typology, with the goal of consolidating existing work into a unified framework and providing a roadmap for practitioners to use co-creation in a more informed fashion. This typology creates avenues for future research through empirical testing.

The present article, from corporate leader’s points of view, explores and provides a framework for the reasons a firm will engage and co-create with shareholders. Although the practice of firms engaging in value creation with shareholders takes place with regular occurrence, little is known about the motivations behind this co-creation. Gaining an understanding into this behaviour can benefit practitioners who wish to develop a value creation relationship with some of their shareholders. Therefore, reason for this undertaking is to develop a conceptual foundation to understand the relationships firms form with their shareholders, where co-creation of value is concerned. Five corporate leader interviews enlighten the research itinerary. The potential reasons for a firm to engage in the co-creation of organizational goals serve as broad themes by which the study is created, analysis is directed and arguments are formatted. The results of the informant interviews provide a cohesive foundation on which to further explore shareholder brand co-creation.

This article empirically investigates if women would be able to create more self-employed value if they had the same educational endowments as men in the unique gender disparity context of Nigeria. The article uses probit and Blinder–Oaxaca multivariate decomposition models to empirically conduct this analysis in a developing country taking advantage of two rounds of survey data. The analysis confirms that women would be able to create more self-employed value, particularly higher education self-employed value, if they had the same educational endowments as men. The article also highlights why gender parity does not exist in Nigeria and emphasizes the benefits of gender parity in this context.

Value is interdisciplinary and, in a broader context, is responsible for forming and bonding the expected configuration of the business model. A business model may allow for capturing value or losing it through inconsistency. It can capture value from customers and other stakeholders, such as investors. If a business model is consistent, then stakeholders believe in it and it attracts value. In practice, many business models are volatile, that is, unstable and highly susceptible to many factors, which make them incapable of ensuring success. This issue is an important area of scientific exploration, inasmuch as the issue of the volatility of business models and the associated negative consequences, in particular the migration of value, have been discussed to a limited extent. The article discusses the volatility of business models and its impact on value migration. Research into the volatility of companies operating in the digital economy listed on the alternative market of the Warsaw Stock Exchange has been presented. Key factors responsible for the volatility of business models of the companies surveyed have been shown in the context of value migration.