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

8. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONSIn the following, last chapter of the study I summarize briefly the process of the study andthe main findings. I go back to the initial aim of the study and the research questions, and Ireflect upon how I have succeeded in fulfilling the aim and answering the researchquestions. I also discuss the contributions of the study regarding both theory and practice, aswell as research methodology. At the end of the chapter I suggest some topics for futureresearch, direct some critical remarks at my own work, and end with some concludingremarks.8.1 A recapitulationThe whole study started out as a result of my own curiosity about value in industrial buyersellerrelationships, a curiosity that had been awakened during my work as a researchassistant and as a management consultant. I had seen that value is relative and ambiguous,and I wanted to explore what the motivations are for buyers and sellers on industrialmarkets to engage in long-term relationships, and what the value is that the parties perceiveto get out of high-involvement relationships. During my career I had been working togetherwith the Seller both as a research assistant carrying out customer satisfaction research and asa consultant, involved in a key account management project; as a result, the marine businesshad become familiar to me. When I started my doctoral research project, a natural choice fora case study was the Seller. Together with Mr SR1&2 from the Seller, I decided to choosethe relationship where the Seller had come farthest in developing a high-involvementrelationship, so the empirical case study ended up being the relationship between the focalSeller and the Buyer presented in the study.The relationship between the companies has lasted since the beginning of the 1970’ suntil the present moment. Until the 1990’ s the relationship was characterized by a moretraditional transactional–type of business, although it had already from the beginning someimportant relational ingredients. It was only in the mid 1990’ s that the talks about apartnership were initiated. The initial talks about a partnership started in 1997 when theBuyer experienced great difficulties with their engines and incurred great costs. Theobjective for the Buyer at that time was to optimize operations and to reduce operationalcosts. One strategy for achieving operational efficiency was to start discussing increasedcooperation with one of the most important suppliers, the Seller. The main reasons forinitiating the talks about a partnership were a situation of dependence and a strongmanagement vision of the benefits of working together with partners in the long run. TheBuyer can be seen to have been to some extent dependent on the Seller already at that time,since they had the Seller engines in their fleet – engines that they would be “ stuck” with for170