Building Strategic Partnerships for Value Co-Creation : A Conceptual Framework for Digital Service Organizations

Abstract

In today’s competitive, fast-paced, and technology-driven markets, digital service organizations are increasingly forming strategic partnerships to transform their businesses, accelerate innovation opportunities, and offer customers enhanced value. How these partnerships should be built to enable value co-creation and strengthen collaboration between the partner organizations has thus become an important question for research and practice. This research develops a conceptual framework to explain value co-creation in strategic (digital service) partnerships and identifies its key enablers. We contribute to the literature by expanding our understanding of how value co-creation between partner organizations occurs as a dynamic and continuous process and how it is influenced by various intra- and inter-organizational factors from institutional, resource integration, and service exchange perspectives. In practice, our research can aid digital service organizations in assessing and building their current and future partnerships to co-create value and sustainable growth in their service ecosystem.