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

partnering and cooperating are so obvious why are not all companies in partnership andcooperating? According to Prahalad (2004) the fundamental reason is that“ Collaboration is not natural, exercising autonomy is. Collaboration requires two ormore units to work together. In most cases, the frictional costs outweigh the obviousbenefits” (Prahalad & Ramsawamy 2004, p 199).A major challenge for management is to communicate throughout the organization the spiritof working in a collaborative manner. The process of involving people and making thembelieve in a different way of working takes time and effort, to turn people’ s heads aroundfrom optimizing their own results to aiming at increasing the total value co-created throughinteraction in the relationship. It also takes new ways of thinking about compensation andmotivation. If the maximization of the total value created in the relationship were be the aiminstead of each unit optimizing its own result, there might be a chance to start seeing awhole new logic and a range of opportunities.” Both BR9 and I realize that we have a struggle within our own organizations to getthe people to understand what this means… or what our aim is (the partnership). Weare a little like two preachers!” (Interview: Seller 1)Methodological contributionThe presented study has been an exploratory case study, relying on qualitative data in theform of interviews and observations. The research process has been abductive, i.e. acombination of induction and deduction. The contribution to research methodology in thefield of business marketing and case study research is that the study represents an exampleof how research can be presented as an iterative learning process, where the role of theresearcher is central, and where the result of the study is a subjective construction of a reallife phenomenon. In this case the construction took the form of a story with the aim ofincreasing the understanding of a social phenomenon and suggesting some generalizationsto be made based on it.I also argue that the study is subjectivist, where the researcher is involved and getsincreasingly involved during the research process and that the values and views of theresearcher affect the study. Reflecting upon my own involvement in the research, I havefrom the very beginning been interested in the phenomenon of value and believed that it iscomplex and dynamic. Therefore I have deliberately taken the path of dealing with it assomething complex and not made any attempt to overlook that. During the process I havealso had to revise some of my initial ideas. At the beginning I believed that a partnership179