Value Co-creation Language

These days we are witness of a philosophical reorientation in rethinking businesses and economies in a way where economies are perceived as service economies following a service-dominant (S-D) logic rather than a traditional goods-dominant (G-D) logic. The cornerstone of this emergent S-D logic of economic exchange is the (co-)creation of value among providers and customers that recognize the value of a service in use rather than in the exchange of goods among economic actors. For example, airlines are no longer buying jet turbines but they buy airtime since they are not interested in owning jet turbines.

Although this shift from a G-D to an S-D logic may seem like a marginal change of pricing models, in fact this paradigm shift has a fundamental impact on the definition and development of products and services, on the underlying processes, on the interaction among economic actors, etc. This shift entails the need to rethink what the key processes are that need to be controlled from a value creation perspective that in turn will and should impact the way of analyzing and modeling economic exchanges.

This is where the proposed research project aims to contribute a value co-creation language (ValCoLa). While process-oriented approaches (based on the traditional G-D logic of economic exchange) are dominant in the existing body of knowledge, ValCoLa aims to establish a value co-creation centered reference language to enable the analysis, modeling, and design of a new generation of information systems i.e., value-aware information systems (VAIS). Since the perception of co-created value in use depends on the given situation/context and since these situations/contexts can change quite rapidly, value co-creation needs to deal with such dynamics. Therefore, the innovation of the ValCoLa project lies not only on the need to integrate the different underlying concepts of value co-creation; but also on dealing with the dynamics of value co-creation processes.

The proposed project contributes a value co-creation reference language, a default notation, a modeling prototype, as well as a number of use cases and case studies applying the developed reference language.