Frontpage  About  admin@impgroup.org
Paper info: KIBS purchasing: triadic relationships and end-user value perceptions

Title


KIBS purchasing: triadic relationships and end-user value perceptions

Authors


Daiane Ribeiro, Juliana Bonomi Santos and Simona D’Antone

Place of Publication


The paper was published at the 34th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2018.

Download


Download paper
(545.2 kb)

Abstract


Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are services delivered to other organizations that have individuals’ knowledge as the main productive resource (Muller & Doloreux, 2009). The productive process of KIBS starts with a specific customer need. The demanding organization usually needs improving some of its characteristics and uses external know-how to do so (Jaakkola & Halinen, 2006). KIBS providers and their customers then interact intensively during the service delivery to co-create a solution together (Lehrer, Ordanini, DeFillippi, & Miozzo, 2012). The literature on the co-creation of KIBS has usually adopted a dyadic perspective, focusing on the relationship between customers and providers (e.g. Bettencourt et al., 2002; Correcher, Cusmano, & Morrison, 2009; Xue & Field, 2010). Increasingly, however, attention is being dedicated to the role the purchasing department plays in intermediating these transactions and the triadic relationships that emerge between the supplier company on one side, and the purchasing and end-user functions in the customer firm (D´Antone & Santos, 2016; Longsdale, Hoque, Kirkpatrick & Sanderson, 2017; Wynstra et al., 2015). The literature, has acknowledged that the interactions amongst these three actors create considerable opportunity for value creation (Lindgreen et al, 2009; Möller, 2006; Walter et al, 2001). However, there has been scant attention to the way KIBS interactions between these three actors generate and affect value creation.