Value Co-Creation in Industrial Buyer-Seller Partnerships ... - Doria

image and also to teaching an organization to work in a new way or to coming up with newinnovative solutions together. All of these at the end serve the same purpose of improvingthe operations of the parties involved.In the following section I turn to discuss what can be done after the decision to pursuea high-involvement relationship has been made – what are the prerequisites for value cocreationpotential?7.3 Interdependence as a prerequisite for value co-creation potentialAt the beginning of the research process as I was exploring the phenomenon of value, Irealized quite soon that there had to be some kind of glue between the companies that wouldkeep them together, an incentive to work together. One of the most obvious glues that canbe found in the IMP literature is the notion of heterogeneous resources; when companiespossess heterogeneous resources it makes sense to interact in order to access and be able toutilize each other’ s resources. This proved to be one of the most important theoreticalstarting points for my argumentation. However, I still felt that I needed a variable thatwould be the dynamic variable in my mental model about value co-creation. As I discussedmy research with colleagues and professors and presented it to audiences both withinacademia and business, the issue of dependence started popping up. Especially businessmanagers brought up dependence as something that was seen as a risk and that had to bemanaged in partnerships. They were applying the traditional economic logic of independentactors acting opportunistically in the market on a long-term, high-involvement relationship,which obviously was completely beside the point.“ An organization does not work that way (win-win)… an organization is cynical. Abusiness organization like ours is suspiscious and cynical, and always assumes a zerosum-game.I think that one has to accept that as a starting point..” (Interview: Seller6)Another reoccurring reaction I got when I talked about partnerships was the suspiciousreaction – people were suspicious about the idea of a partnership because they thought thatit had something to do with charity or giving things away for free. Somehow the wordpartnership was associated with friendship, as if there was no economic logic involved.I started realizing that there was something wrong with this. If managers were afraid ofdependence and did not realize the basic logic of long-term business relationships, therewould be severe difficulties in developing partnerships. One inherent characteristic of apartnership is that it includes long-term commitment, which over time creates degrees of154