Sustainable value co-creation in business networks

Article published by Sylvie Lacoste in the Industrial Marketing Management journal of Elsevier in January 2016. Sylvie Lacoste is the head of Devinci Research Center – Business Group at Pôle Léonard de Vinci

The article highlights the role played by sustainability in business-to-business value co-creation. The study reveals that sustainability, by reinforcing a service proposition, is either at the core or an incremental element of value co-creation. Furthermore, Sylvie Lacoste demonstrates the role of sustainability in a value co-creation process that links the supplier and customer networks, in which suppliers lead this value co-creation process by improving the sustainable fit between their customer and the end customer.

Even though the Service Dominant Logic (SDL) paradigm has contributed to the conceptualization of “value co-creation”, no academic study has further investigated the role played by sustainability in business-to-business (BtoB) value co-creation.

Using case studies, Sylvie Lacoste examines how BtoB companies embrace the concept of sustainability to co-create value. She determined that such a co-creation of value entails a two-stage process:

• First, suppliers co-create value with their customer’s customers or end users by analyzing or co-creating sustainability awareness.
• Second, by integrating this behavioral knowledge, suppliers co-create with their direct customers, either a sustainable hybrid offering (a service bundled with a product) or an extended sustainable service.

Such a service proposition enables suppliers’ direct customers to increase performance (sustainability is at the core of value creation) or to integrate sustainability into their supply chain (sustainability is an incremental element of value creation).

Our research enriches the SDL paradigm by demonstrating the role of sustainability in reinforcing or extending the service proposition in a value co-creation process that links the supplier and customer networks.

Learn more about the Devinci Research Center – Business Group: www.devinci.fr

Full article: www.sciencedirect.com