Suchergebnisse

Decouple Market Shaping and Business Redefinition3 Shape Your Market; Stora Enso: Many-Layered Market Shaping; Exchange: What Is Sold, How It Is Priced, and How Buyers and Sellers Find Each Other; Sales Item: What Is Being Exchanged, Exactly?; Pricing: How Much Is It Worth?; Matching Methods: How Do Sellers and Buyers Find Each Other?; Network: Right Partners, Right Know-How, Right Infrastructure; Actors: Do We Have the Right Actors in Our Network?; Roles and Know-How: Is Work Division Optimal; Does Everyone Know What They Need to Know?

Multiple research efforts are currently unfolding to advance the wide-scale sustainability transformation of services and service ecosystems to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While "how" to create service ecosystems and "whom" and "what" these service ecosystems serve have been receiving increasing scholarly attention, current research leaves the "where" question relatively underexplored. Thus, precise theoretical conceptualizations of the role of spaces and places in sustainable service ecosystem design (SED) are lacking. By longitudinally investigating two in-depth case studies, we illuminate the spatial aspects of sustainable SED. Our findings suggest five spatial mechanisms that enlighten how sustainable SED unfolds in relation to spaces and places. We also identify three tensions that affect the implementation of sustainable SED, each tension having both enabling and constraining manifestations. The study contributes to the service research on sustainability by illuminating the previously under-researched spatial aspects of sustainable SED. Results have implications for a broad set of actors involved in sustainable SED, providing advice on how to design new and utilize existing spaces and places to maximize their potential in addressing sustainability challenges.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how, taking customer relationships as the unit of analysis, the heterogeneity of customer relationship performance influences the heterogeneity of firm performance, and how firms can balance the heterogeneity of customers, customer relationships, and customer portfolios by differentiated business models.Design/methodology/approachThe approach to the topic is one of theoretical analysis and conceptual development.FindingsValue capture is defined as the discounted present value of all future economic profit from the relationship. Three sources of value capture heterogeneity are identified: the customer, the relationship with the customer, and the interdependence between customers in a customer base. Relationship performance can be improved by investing in business model differentiation, in order to facilitate controlled adaptation to specific customer relationships and/or customer portfolios. Firms have to manage parallel business models and a central capability is the ability to create internal fit between the elements of a specific business model.Research limitations/implicationsThe research presented relates to business‐to‐business customer relationships. Some of the conceptual thinking will not be applicable in consumer relationships.Practical implicationsA firm should have an optimum mix of customer relationships in its customer base, in relation to firm goals and strategy. Management needs to recognize the heterogeneity of customer relationship performance, and manage customer portfolios accordingly. In order to deal with the heterogeneity, it may be necessary to manage parallel business models. This will necessitate new capabilities, such as customer insight generation, account management, modularized production platforms, and relationship performance control.Originality/valueFor a scholarly audience the paper contributes to the discussion on how marketing improves firm performance by assuming responsibility for increasing firms' market value. For a practitioner audience it offers ideas for genuinely customer‐centric management.

PurposeFirms transforming from a product supplier into a solution provider need to develop entirely new organizational capabilities or re-configure existing ones. This paper aims to conceptualize solution business fitness (SBF) as a construct that captures comprehensively the capabilities necessary for a firm to operate successfully in solution business and investigates how the construct can be measured.Design/methodology/approachBased on a conceptualization of solution-specific capabilities and SBF, the development of the SBF measurement model followed a three-step procedure: domain specification and conceptual development, qualitative pre-study and quantitative pre-study. The SBF measurement model and its relevance were studied in a large scale longitudinal study using survey data from firm representatives, as well as archival data about the turnover and profitability development of the respective solution providers.FindingsThe study empirically validates solution-business-specific capabilities as antecedents of firm performance and shows how different business logics applied by firms give capabilities different importance and impact.Practical implicationsManagerially, firms can use the developed measurement tool to assess their current SBF and define the desired target status. When improving the SBF, managers should pay special attention to the business logic of their firm, as the required capabilities are context-dependent.Originality/valueThe study is the first to conceptualize and measure SBF and to empirically investigate the moderating role of business logic on the importance of the concept and its elements.