Value co-destruction: Exploring the role of actors' opportunism in the B2B context. (June 2020) - Pathak, Buddhi
Highlights: Value co-creation happens when alliance partners share resources, support value propositions and have perceived value in the ecosystem. Successful alliances show strong governance strategies and channel policies play a key role in facilitating value co-creation in the ecosystem. Value co-destruction happens due to conflictual interactions between alliance actors resulting in win-lose or lose-lose outcomes. Alliance actors show strong- and weak-forms of opportunism, which weakens the foundation of collaboration and results in value co-destruction. This research is more encompassing because it explores factors that lead to both value co-creation and co-destruction. Abstract: This exploratory study investigates value co-destruction in the Business-to-Business (B2B) context and examines the impact of actors' opportunistic behaviour on value co-creation. The research undertakes an in-depth case study based approach. It uses data triangulation, where multiple sources of evidence (interviews, conference audio recordings and documents) are collected from the case organisation (a vendor) and its service ecosystem partners in the ICT sector. The partners included in the study are distributors, channel partners, competitors, and customers. B2B alliances are driven by the motivations to maximise strategic value and minimise transaction cost. Thus, using the ecosystem lens, we find that actors' capabilities (resources and perceived value), vendor's approach to achieving strategic benefit and the channel governance mechanism enable value co-creation. However, using the transaction cost theory lens, we report that actors' opportunistic behaviour, technological disruptions and new business model challenges lead to value co-destruction (in the form of termination of relationship, conflict and business liquidation). Alliance partners need to evaluate the strategic benefits of collaboration, knowledge sharing, learning, trust building, market expansion and technology sharing, considering partners' self-serving behaviour driven by transaction cost economies. All ecosystem actors are seeking to develop capabilities, exhibit knowledge differentiators, demonstrate technology leadership, reduce uncertainty and respond to new business model challenges thus causing value co-destruction. Thus, this research is more encompassing because it explores factors that lead to both value co-creation and co-destruction.