Paper info

A Conceptual Tool for Joint Value Creation in Business Relationships: A Case from the Software Industry

Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi , Pauliina Hirvonen, Sari Sallinen and Veikko Seppänen

The paper was published at the 16th IMP-conference in Bath, U.K in 2000.

Studying business relationships in different contexts has been one of the major themes in theindustrial marketing and purchasing literature for several years. Much emphasis has beengiven especially on interpreting and making sense of the development of the complexbusiness relationships. One of the recent key areas of interest, arriving from the research onindustrial business relationships, is the theoretical discussion on value creation. Theunderlying idea of this discussion is that the supplier can, by examining the customer's valuecreation processes, achieve a thorough understanding of the goals and concerns of thecustomer organizations. In this way, the supplier can provide actions enabling the customer tostrengthen its processes. This can lead to joint value creating processes in the businessrelationships. Since the research done on industrial business relationships has been ratherdescriptive, less focus has been given on creating practical tools for developing businessrelationships. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual tool for managing businessrelationships towards joint value creation. The area of application is the software industry.We use a case involving a large company buying complex software as an empirical example.