Value Chain 2.0

I’ve just read Value Chain 2.0 by Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang 0f ThinkStudio. The authors hypothesis was that when consumers shift from being passive to active, they become integral parts of the value creation process – Value 2.0. I agree.

This analysis contributes to the expanding literature on the economic and social consequences arising from the Participative Web. My last two postings (in reference to changes in the work place and social capital value accruing from social networking) are also subsets of the Participative Web.

Participation is reshaping the media too – instead of passively sitting back to take whatever broadcasters and publishers distribute, consumers are now producers and distributors – prosumers as they say.

Instead of passively taking in media accounts of political developments, citizens are now journalists and they communicate directly online with senior politicians. So it goes on.

The authors of Value Chain 2.0 observed that a company’s support environment (especially Internet-based industries):

• does not belong to the company itself anymore, but to the “whole ecosystem in which the company is immersed” (page 5). Being an ecosystem, there are multiple stakeholders
• the internal processes of a company must connect with the non-linear, complex and networked realities of the participative economy
• the value chain 2.0 is only valid for companies that have opened up their value chains to integrate their customers.

The authors refer to the ‘infrastructures’ of a company connecting directly with the infrastructures of the other stakeholders. On the face of it, that sounds reasonable but I am left scratching my head some what. There is an assumed complementary relationship between value chain 1.0 and 2.0. But it seems to me that dynamic is really the tricky bit. How much would value chain 1.0 change in the course of connecting with value chain 2.0? Will a new and as yet unknown value chain emerge? Possibly.