Value In Practice: Networked Value
There's Value to be found in your networks and ecosystems. Question is: how?!
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Last week’s edition gave us quite a bit of material regarding finding Value and Value creation opportunities within the value chains our businesses, non-profits and creative ventures occupy by way of a nifty concept called Value Networks and Ecosystems.
As a reminder, the thing behind Value Networks and Ecosystems is scrutinizing the interactions you have with the players in your value chain from a Value creation perspective, at the level of the Value ecosystem, and at the level of the Value network.
You can get into the rest of this powerful concept, full definitions and everything, in last week’s edition right here:
We’re back at it again this week, but this time with a case study to really practicalize it!
We’ll be using same example agency we used in the Value In Practice edition from about 2 weeks ago, Agency Alpha.
Side note: If you haven’t already, you should give these 2 editions a read: not only is it the first intro to the example agency, but the example and the concept I was explaining is pretty cool too :)
Let’s get into it!
Quick refresher:
We’ve got Alpha, a large and historically renowned small business support agency. Alpha’s finding itself being rendered obsolete by parties within its operational environment, which include:
smaller business support agencies,
corporate companies with business development programmes,
and similar organizations with a specific focus on helping small businesses grow.
The catch?
The nature of Alpha’s work makes it impossible to not engage all of these those parties; they’re in the same value chain and Alpha is the largest, so it’s inevitable that they all cross paths.
The mission:
Alpha at this point needs a way to (re)create Value and recapture lost ground, while also not completely alienating themselves from the parties in the environment.
Alpha’s Solution:
The keen Value creation strategists at Alpha decide to try uncovering places where they can create Value, this time using the Value Networks and Ecosystems sector in the Vivre Value Mapping framework.
In their mapping, they identify a number of Value creation opportunities connected to their specific presence and connectivity in the value chain and business environment they occupy:
The historical role they’ve played in business development environment and value chain means that customers in that environment trust them more, giving them an advantage
The value chain is structured in such a way that all the parties in it, including competitors, have to engage each other at some point
This is because everyone serves the customers in very similar ways, in similar spaces, and
because of the partnerships they sometimes set up to serve the customers
In particular, the smaller agencies and organizations in the value chain have to engage with Alpha itself at some points during their work because of Alpha’s status and prestige as the largest agency in the environment or value chain
This presents an incredible opportunity to Alpha, which is the opportunity to set itself up as the lynchpin, or center, for the value chain.
This would ensure that nobody in Alpha’s value chain and business environment can do anything connected with what Alpha does in the ecosystem, without involving Alpha.
Under Value Innovation, this powerful move is defined as becoming the ecosystem facilitator.
To achieve this, Alpha should ask questions like:
What is the current state of the Value ecosystem?
Who is connected to whom, and what’s the Value they create from those connections?What is our size/importance in the current ecosystem?
What are our existing Value networks? Are they maximizing our Value creation?
Who is the ‘leader’ or the closest to being the ecosystem facilitator?
What ‘factors’ are important or big ticket factors for becoming an ecosystem facilitator in this ecosystem?
Are there any collaborations between the competitors that put them closer to being a facilitator?
With answers to all these questions, Alpha has a better understanding of the Value creation dynamics in the Value Networks and Ecosystems they are party to, putting them in a better position to redevelop their Value offering or create a Value Strategy that improves their status in the Value chain.
If Value Networks and Ecosystems sounds like something you’d like to learn more about and you’d like to see how it can be leveraged to create Value in your business, non-profit or creative venture, I’m exactly who you need to call!
Click right here to pop me an email!
Tell me more about what you think about this latest edition, and how you’ve been thinking about Value creation for your enterprise in the comments, drop me a line on LinkedIn, or if you received this an email, send me a reply!