Chapter 5: How Offerings Link Co-Creators in Value Creating Systems

Box 5.1: Chapter 5 at a Glance

The offering is the core unit of analysis in this book. It is a rich construct, both conceptually and in terms of practice, and it is also paradoxical. The offering manifests the relationship of co-creation between actors, and in joining them, distinguishes them from each other in terms of roles and — typically — also in terms of values. In the value creating systems (VCSs) approach to strategy, strategists design, create or change offerings that act as the organising “links” that manifest how interacting actors co-create value. With an offering, an actor is linked to another, and they act together in concert to mobilise resources in ways that enable the creation of both value and values. In VCSs, there are two kinds of offerings; configuring offerings that organise the VCS, and support offerings between two actors within the system. Offerings can be static or more dynamic and open to change by their co-creators. In a networked world, this frame poses challenges (and also new offering design tasks) for strategists. We describe five elements required to be designed into an offering: people, process, technology, information, and a risk-sharing formula. This chapter is centrally concerned with defining, describing, and analysing how offerings work and the choices involved in designing them.