Value-centric business development: descriptive and prescriptive research into five different companies

The companies that discover changes and possibilities within the value system first and make use of them are considered to be prime movers and often are more successful than those who adapt late. Research has been done on multiple levels for understanding value-centric business from a practical perspective as well as from a theoretical perspective. In the first stage of the research (Descriptive Study 1), practical experience and knowledge were gained simultaneously from a case company and from literature-based case analysis. As output of a prescriptive study, a specification of a proactive value-centric business was proposed and a practical method for building a value-centric product, service, and business model was developed. In the last stage of the research (Descriptive Study 2), the method was tested at four case companies from different fields. The paper describes the data collection, analysis, and results involved in both the descriptive and the prescriptive phases of the research.