Tensions in value spaces: The organizational buying center and advanced services

Advanced services necessitate redistribution of activities and new value co-creation processes and configurations, which are negotiated through interactions between organizations' buying centers (BCs) and selling centers (SCs). Transition to advanced services is rarely smooth because ecosystem actors often move into value spaces or territories (in which value is created/co-created) occupied and/or coveted by other actors. An exploratory qualitative approach was used to explore the value-space tensions (22 semi-structured interviews with senior executives from a range of industrial sectors and ecosystem positions). Our findings identify four advanced services lifecycle phases and demonstrate how managing these tensions across phases and BCs and SCs within the ecosystem is a necessary negotiated process impacting value creation/co-creation. We adopt a new theoretical lens (combining territorial servitization and territoriality from economic geography) to explore value spaces within-and-between BCs and SCs in advanced services ecosystems, and contribute to extant literature by: (1) delineating servitization value-space tensions as either cognitive/relational or Cartesian/physical; (2) illustrating how value-space tensions within-and-between BCs and SCs hamper advanced service implementation; (3) revealing how value-space tensions within-and-between BCs and SCs impact value co-creation; and, (4) demonstrating how different tensions manifest between BCs and SCs across the advanced services lifecycle.

Automated summary

This study examines value-space tensions within advanced services ecosystems and identifies four lifecycle phases. The findings demonstrate the importance of managing these tensions across phases and different organizations within an ecosystem, as they impact value creation and co-creation.