Value Capture Research Articles

Land Policies and Institutions for Equitable and Resilient Growth in Africa

AbstractIn coming decades, Africa's urban populations will expand, and the effects of climate change be more keenly felt. Land policies and institutions will be key for urban dwellers to be able access productive jobs, breathe clean air, and live in decent housing; for entrepreneurs, especially women, to leverage land for productive investment; and for farmers to diversify, insure against shocks, and accumulate capital. Yet, many African land registries perform poorly, command little trust, and have failed to capitalize on opportunities to improve quality, relevance, and outreach via digital interoperability, use of earth observation, and connectivity. Literature highlights scope for regulatory and institutional reforms to (a) expand property taxation and land value capture and to improve urban service delivery, planning, and land use regulations; (b) increase quality and affordability of land services and access to land price and ownership data; (c) guide issuance of rural land use rights to reduce barriers to rural factor markets, including by spatially enabling farmer registries to improve subsidy targeting and effectiveness; and (d) demarcation and transparent decentralized management of public land to attract investment, including in climate finance, without fueling corruption, and to manage disputes before they escalate into ethnic violence.

Aligning servitization and circularity: The role of institutional confluence in sustainable business models

This conceptual study explores the alignment between servitization—a shift from selling products to offering services—and circularity principles. The study introduces institutional confluence—a configuration of institutional pressures that enhance business model legitimacy to stakeholders and facilitate operational success— which can serve as a driver aligning servitization with circular principles. Institutional confluence has the capacity to trigger novel business models, shape resources and processes, enhance value capture, and inhibit unsustainable business models. The study develops the concept and underscores the role of institutional confluence in promoting this alignment and subsequent environmental sustainability. The article utilizes illustrative case examples from servitization and circular business models to develop the concept of institutional confluence serving sustainable servitization. The study offers strategic insights for managers and policymakers, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach that integrates servitization and circularity from the outset of business model design. It advocates for policies that leverage regulatory, normative, and mimetic pressures to foster sustainable business practices. The article contributes to the servitization literature by delineating the mechanisms through which institutional forces facilitate or hinder the integration of servitization and circularity, offering directions for future research to explore these dynamics across different contexts and industries.

Value Capture

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle — or developing in that direction. The agent enters a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in our private reasoning and our public justification. But value capture poses several threats. First, value capture threatens to change the goals of our activities, in a way that often threatens to undermine the value of those activities. Twitter’s scoring system threatens to replace some of the richer goals of communication — understanding, connection, and the mutual pursuit of truth — with the thinner goals of getting likes and going viral. Second, in value capture, we take a core process of our autonomy and self-governance — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to self-governing deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich particular and context-sensitive experience of the world. Our values should be carefully tailored to our particular selves and particular communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack.

Business model, strategies and performance of baobab enterprises: Insight for the NTFPs industry

While non-timber forest products (NTFPs) hold global significance, their integration into global value chains remains limited. However, baobab production and marketing stand out as an exception, thus offering insights for developing potential competitive NTFPs-based industries. This study assesses the business model, and strategies of baobab enterprises and its effect on performance to inform the advancement of NTFPs commercialisation. Analysing firm level data from 137 baobab enterprises, we describe the main business model architypes and the essential features that characterise the value proposition, value creation/delivery, and value capture of the baobab enterprises. Our findings further reveal reactor strategy as the most prevalent among the four identified business strategies (defender, analyser, prospector, and reactor), while overall, business strategy did not influence enterprises’ performance. The dominance of the reactor strategy demonstrates that the baobab industry is still in the developmental stage, low tech, and predominantly microscale. Drawing on the findings, the paper highlights critical implications for policy, practice and research essential for the development and sustainability of the baobab industry and NTFPs-based industries.

Marketisation, ownership and digitalisation strategies in the sport industry – generic insights and future research

PurposeThe motivation for this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of some of the important and trending topics in the sport industry. Besides this, to consider the changing landscape of ownership, strategies and organisation of several types of sports in the contemporary environment, there is a need for deeper contextual knowledge of how different sport/s, leagues, clubs, associations, teams etc. own, organise and strategise at local to national to regional to international contexts.Design/methodology/approachThis paper introduces the special issue on the sport industry that welcomes three interesting contributions of focusing on the important themes related to the sport industry. They include (1) digital transformation and needed capabilities, (2) fan engagement in a digital way using social media and finally (3) the relevance and relation of social capital in the organisational strategy of sports organisations.FindingsFour generic insights related to the themes and emerging trends in marketisation, ownership and digitalisation strategies in the sport industry are introduced in this paper. The first insight is that sports digitalisation and politicisation significantly impact the strategising, organising and networking activities of sports owners to foster value capture. Secondly, owners’ performance duality of marketisation of their sports clubs and vested business interests unravels the paradoxes of idealism and profit-maximisation. Thirdly, individual sports stars position themselves as an influential platform of value creation through on-field performance, social engagement and self-interests. Finally, the fourth insight is that the dual aims of sporting on-field success and profit making of large capital-funded sports clubs endanger the autonomy and governance of sports bodies/associations and an equitable sporting competition environment.Originality/valueThis paper provides an overview and reflections on the contributions of the papers in this special issue. The papers give different perspectives on how sport has been influenced by the development in society (1) with increasing digitalisation influencing organising of sport clubs and strategies for engaging fans, and (2) the influence of marketisation and politics in ownership strategies. As such, four insightful reflections are developed based on the originality of the contributions and the related extant literature presented on the themes of marketisation, ownership and digitalisation of the sport industry.

(Dis)connecting rent gap and gentrification in verticalizing cities: The cases of Iquique and Antofagasta, Chile

This paper explores the concept of density rent gaps in verticalizing cities, with relation to Peter Marcuse's displacement categories. The study highlights a commonly uncritical relation with the rent gap that both defenders and critics of gentrification usually assume in the literature. Results from a quantitative analysis of a Displacement Index suggest that the largest rent gaps do not always correlate with the highest displacement rates because, in verticalizing cities, the most significant rent gaps come from ‘density rent’ and not necessarily the most expensive new housing. The study focuses on Chile's second-tier towns of Iquique and Antofagasta (seldom seen in the international literature). It uses real estate and population data and fieldwork analysis to fill data voids and caps the rent gap to estimate the amount of land value capture possible to implement to reduce Chile's highly exclusionary housing environment. We believe this analysis helps to conceptually separate the rent gap from gentrification for a more precise urban analysis of vertical cities.

Examining Property Value Increment along Greenways: A Hedonic Pricing Analysis in Chengdu, China

Examining Property Value Increment along Greenways: A Hedonic Pricing Analysis in Chengdu, China

Traditional agencies on bridges: How is digital transformation changing business models?

AbstractDigital technologies produce new strategic and organizational challenges for incumbent firms that require major digital transformation (DT) processes, leading to the evolution of business models (BMs). Contributing to the research stream on DT and BM evolution, this study explores which technologies have the most relevant effect on core BM dimensions, i.e., value proposition, value creation, and value capture, by investigating both the consequent themes and intensities of change in these dimensions. A valuable context for analysis was chosen: the advertising industry and traditional communication agencies, namely, creative and media agencies. Based on 38 in-depth interviews with senior communication professionals and qualitative content analysis, we propose a comprehensive reading of (1) the impact of specific technologies on different BM dimensions and components and (2) the themes and intensities of change in creative and media agencies’ BM dimensions. Finally, we outline an interpretative framework, identifying two different paths for incumbents: outside-in BM adaptation and inside-out BM innovation. This study therefore offers two academic contributions. First, it overcomes the vagueness of previous investigations that considered the effects of digital technologies in general terms, and it also resolves the narrow scope of research that focused only on the impact of one specific technology. Second, by deepening the understanding of the joint evolutions and intensities of change across all three BM dimensions, this study has widened the limited scope of previous contributions on one BM dimension. By doing so, it offers a comprehensive reading of BM dynamics due to DT.

Enhancing private infrastructure financing through capturing spillover effect: Conceptual development and an empirical case study of Vietnam’s expressways

While infrastructure provides necessary public services and is vital for the socio-economic development of a nation, public funds alone cannot finance all infrastructure needs in society, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, where many countries are facing budget deficits. Although private financing schemes, such as public-private partnerships (PPPs) and land value capture, have been considered intensively, they have yet to produce adequate private capital flows to infrastructure projects due to a lack of incentives for private investors. Against the background, this paper proposes a new financing mechanism in which governments might divert some of the increased tax revenue from the spillover effects of newly constructed infrastructures to fund the private sector through grants or subsidies. The empirical work in Vietnam shows a significant increase in tax revenues after completing two expressways, supporting our idea about spillover effects, which includes small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) development. This study’s results suggest that spillover effects can bring new opportunities for governments and multilateral development banks (MDBs) to implement infrastructure projects with greater private sector involvement in the region. It also proposes some financial schemes, such as land capture and financing for business startups, including SMEs, to enhance the spillover effects of infrastructure.

Doing good while making profits: A typology of business models for social ventures

AbstractResearch SummaryBuilding on business model research and the social entrepreneurship literature, we conceptually develop a set of business model choices for social ventures. These choices specify the scope of venture beneficiaries, the extent that customers and beneficiaries overlap, and how social meaning is attached to the venture's value proposition. Concurrent configurations of these choices give rise to four types of social business models: (1) Social Stimulators, (2) Social Providers, (3) Social Producers, and (4) Social Intermediaries. We illustrate this typology using data from seven social ventures and formulate propositions about the implications these business model choices have for a venture's value creation and value capture potential. We then discuss contributions to the literature on social ventures and social entrepreneurship, and the literature on business models.Managerial SummaryIn this article, we propose a framework outlining key business model choices for social ventures. These choices include the scope of target beneficiaries of the venture, the degree of overlap between customers and beneficiaries, and how the venture communicates its social mission through its value proposition. By combining these choices in different ways, we identify four distinct types of social business models which we call Social Stimulators, Social Providers, Social Producers, and Social Intermediaries. To bring this framework to life, we have examined data from seven real‐world social ventures, offering concrete examples to illustrate each type. For each of these four types of social business models, we have also formulated propositions about how the business model choices impact a venture's value creation and value capture potential.

Digitally enabled business models for a circular plastic economy in Africa

In recognition of the need for an economic logic that complements and reinforces the ecological imperative for the circular plastic economy, this paper explores the importance and impact of digitally enabled circular plastic business models across retailing and distribution systems. The paper draws from 16 focus group discussions, complemented by 17 semi-structured interviews of frontline organisations incorporating digital innovations in their businesses to enable the management of plastic waste in Africa. The study finds that, across African countries, the transition to a circular plastic economy has been hampered by the limited uptake of circular products by consumers. In order to accelerate the transition, innovative business models are required to invigorate the ecosystem and simplify the logistics of retailing and distribution systems. The paper proposes a new conceptual framework that explicates the impact of digital innovations in the processes of value creation and value capture across a whole spectrum of circular economy reverse logistics activities: recycling, redistribution, and remanufacture. The study also highlights two important social and policy implications of digitally-enabled circular business models: Firstly, the creation of new employment opportunities through the empowerment of a new labour force for the circular plastic economy; secondly, the heightened opportunity to enact an innovative sharing economy in typically resource-constrained contexts in which otherwise idle products and resources are more efficiently used in a process of collaborative consumption.

Empirical opportunities for advancing theory and research on strategic human capital

The strategic human capital conversation is a vibrant research area with many empirical opportunities. In this short editorial, we describe four key research areas that would benefit from empirical advancements: (1) perceptions of mobility prospects and firm-specific human capital theory, (2) firm-specific incentives, (3) emergence of the unit-level human capital resource, and (4) value creation and value capture issues in human capital research. We describe opportunities to validate certain measures, improve existing measures, develop new measures, and replicate initial findings.

The rapacious ambivalence of VC investment: Venture capital, value capture, and the valorization of crisis

Abstract This article explores venture capital (VC) as a means and process of accumulating future social necessity. It explores the mechanisms of growth that make VC-backed firms distinct. I argue that a distinctive feature of surplus value capture through VC is valorization via socially necessary contracted space-time, a corrective to Marx’s theorization of socially necessary labor time, which appears incomplete in the context of VC. First, extending Marx’s general formula for capital, I develop a general formula for VC, demonstrating how the VC investment upends traditional theories of capitalist accumulation. Second, I argue that VC invests in firms seeking to capture ‘human capital’ resources and uncapitalized market ‘space’ (noncapitalist social logics of exchange) with the aim of achieving ‘product-market fit’. Third, I demonstrate how time and space are contracted under the VC process as a value capture (VC) mechanism relating to future social necessity. VC is, I argue, about accumulating today what we will all need to be consuming tomorrow, just to keep up with social norms. Finally, I explore how the valorization of crisis (VC) demonstrates the accumulation of future social necessity in practice. I conclude with thoughts concerning the possibility of alternatives beyond the overdetermined rapacity of ‘VC’.

The social lives of rental proptech: Entanglements between capitalist, care and techno-utopian values

Housing’s value is contested, with discussions including the economic value of housing through literature on assetisation and financialisation, social value in debates about housing as a human right, value capture in infrastructure development, and the value of housing for social reproduction. With this in mind, we engage with the various ways housing, tenants and Proptech are valued by tenant advocates, real estate professionals, and proptech developers in Sydney, Australia. This is not as a reductive exercise to find ‘the value’ of housing or Proptech, but to recognise and engage with the ways various social, digital and financial valuations of housing, tenants and digital technologies inform a situated and relational politics of Proptech value. As such we advance a ‘more-than-political’ economy of Proptech. To illustrate this conceptual case, we discuss three regimes of rental Proptech value in Australia – capitalist and economic regimes; social capital through an ethic of care; and techno-utopian values, where technology is deployed on the basis that it will solve a presumed problem. Our empirical focus is on the application of Proptech to longer-term rental market, which is emerging in less visible ways than its highly contested counterparts in the short-term rental sector.

Public-private partnerships and land value capture: A convergent framework to improve the procurement of urban rail transit infrastructure

The use of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) and Land Value Capture (LVC) as a procurement model to deliver Urban Rail Transit (URT) systems and networks has received mixed reviews. This paper addresses the following research question: How can the public sector effectively realise the benefits of integrating PPP with LVC when procuring URTs? We use a structured-case method to build, test, and revise a series of conceptual frameworks from the experiences of cities (i.e., Guangzhou, Guiyang, and Wuhan). The contributions of this research are threefold as it: (1) provides a state-of-the-art examination of PPP and LVC practice; (2) develops a convergent framework that takes into consideration the context and sub-contexts of PPP and LVC used to procure URTs; and (3) presents the public sector with a frame of reference that can be drawn upon to realise the benefits of integrating PPPs with LVC.

The upside-down world of value capture. Do companies in technology sector follow the principles of profitable growth?

The technology sector has been showing a constant increase in the number of M&A transaction over the last years, setting record in both deal volume and value. For many companies, this is the only way to obtain the unique resources and build capacity necessary to succeed in the fast-paced business environment. The current paper investigates whether the strategic deals, which have been driving the technology sector over the last decade, can be considered value-creating and had a positive impact on the acquirers’ long-term financial performance. To analyze the changes in the performance of bidding companies both univariate and multiple-regression analyses were performed. The results show that overall the acquiring companies could not achieve profitable growth and fully capture value and the benefits of M&A. The acquirers showed rather a deterioration in post-acquisition profitability, efficiency, and growth. The focus (international and industrial) was associated with the best results in terms of both profitability and growth, while the largest increase in post-event growth rates was achieved by the companies from the emerging markets and in the first years following the completion of the deal. Число сделок M&A в отрасли технологий неизменно увеличивалось в последние годы, достигая рекордных значений в абсолютном и денежном выражении. Это объясняется тем, что для многих компаний неорганический рост является единственным способом приобретения уникальных ресурсов и создания конкурентного преимущества в стремительно быстро меняющейся деловой среде. Цель данной статьи — исследовать, создавали ли стратегические сделки M&A, которые были драйвером развития в секторе технологий в последнее десятилетие, ценность и имели ли они положительный эффект на долгосрочные финансовые результаты компаний-покупателей. Для анализа изменений финансовых результатов компаний-покупателей были проведены одномерный и множественный регрессионные анализы. Результаты показывают, что в целом рост компаний-покупателей не являлся прибыльным, и они не смогли реализовать все ожидаемые преимущества сделки. Их показатели прибыльности, эффективности и роста ухудшались в период после заключения сделки. Фокус (отраслевой и национальный) ассоциировался с большим успехом — как в выражении прибыльности, так и роста. Наибольшее увеличение в ставках роста было достигнуто компаниями на развивающихся рынках и в первые годы после заключения сделки.

From value creation to value capture practices in healthcare innovation collaborations

ABSTRACT Healthcare is a challenging field for innovation: it is characterised by complex regulation and needs for enhanced collaboration between public and private actors who differ in terms of their motivations, innovation needs, and institutional logics. These complexities relate to multiple ways of approaching value capture in terms of securing financial or non-financial benefits from value creation in innovation collaboration. At the same time, existing scholarly knowledge offers limited help to understand or manage value capture practices in public-private collaborations. Exploring the specific practices of value capture is needed not only to understand how the returns from shared value creation activities are secured but also to understand why public and private organisations should invest their limited resources in collaboration in the first place. Applying insights from the innovation management and industrial marketing literatures, the present case study explores value capture practices in public-private collaborations for healthcare technological innovation. Empirically, it draws from twelve collaborations between a public hospital and private firms providing insight into both private firms and a public hospital organization. As a result, the study suggests a categorisation of value capture practices emerging in innovation collaboration in healthcare, thereby explicating how such practices incorporate approaches of both public and private sector participants.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, but Can You Ever Leave? A Theory of Firm Value Capture from Alumni

In modern organizations, key sources of competitive advantage are embedded in employees. Management theory has traditionally viewed employee exit as the end of firms’ relationships with employees and, consequently, the end of access to human capital and other resources embedded in departing individuals. However, recent research suggests that firms can benefit from the continuation of relationships with alumni employees. We argue that how organizations create and maintain connections to alumni is critical, as it shapes the nature of potentially valuable organization-level alumni resources. We develop a theory of firm value capture from alumni that explains how firms’ norms and policies before, during, and after employee exit affect firms’ alumni relations climate—a shared perception among a firm’s current and former employees that the firm values alumni. We further theorize that the alumni relations climate will lead to creation of firm-level alumni resources, with the configuration of these resources shaped by alumni identification. That is, the extent to which firms’ alumni identify with the firm versus with members of the firm’s remaining workforce (or balanced between the two) will have implications for the configuration of alumni resources that are potentially accessible to the firm. Our theory describes how these different alumni resource configurations come with inherent benefits and costs when it comes to the value that firms are able to capture from their alumni resources. We illustrate the value of this theoretical perspective by identifying meaningful practical implications and avenues for future research.

Walmart in India: Crafting competitive advantage using joint venture and acquisition

Walmart has a global reputation for building robust Information Technology driven infrastructure for modern retail. However, its Indian operations were constrained by the government’s Foreign Direct Investment policy in multi-brand retail that allowed entry only through the Business2Business route for protecting small retailers. The policy restriction limited the scope of value capture for Walmart in the growing Indian retail market. Walmart used partnerships and creative tweaking of its business model to adapt to the business environment in India. It used a joint venture with Bharti Retail, a local partner, to enter the Indian market. Walmart acted as suppliers to small retailers and also invested in a focused program to improve their efficiency. Further, the joint venture allowed Walmart to generate additional revenue sources (royalty and other fee incomes) to recover its investments in supply chain development. The tweaks in the business model to improve value appropriation were however evaluated unfavorably by the stakeholders in India prompting dissolution of the joint venture. Later, with online retail becoming prominent, Walmart acquired majority stake in Flipkart, a leading e-commerce player in India, to renew its capabilities and evolve a business model for the new era of omni-channel retail.

The concept of a sustainable business model: Opportunities and challenges


 
 
 The concept of sustainable development is considered one of the most important and urgent challenges facing humanity today. Therefore, solutions that promote sustainable business are of particular importance. The purpose of this article was to explore the concept of a business model as a potentially promising way of shaping the contribution of businesses to sustainable development. A systematic literature review method was used to identify, analyze and critically evaluate the first theoretical proposals for the concept of a sustainable business model. Fundamental differences between the proposed conceptualizations were identified, stemming from different understandings of the business model concept on the one hand, and from its embedding in different, partly contradictory approaches, to corporate contributions to sustainable development, on the other. The article adapts the holistic approach of corporate sustainability and the understanding of the business model as a representation of the essence of business including the proposition, creation, delivery and capture of value. As a result, key elements of the emerging new ontology of the sustainable business model have been identified and defined. The proposed concept of a sustainable business model primarily means adopting a different logic of business, and the basis for defining the various elements of the business model is the reconstruction of the concept of value. The sustainability of a business model is thus referred to the extent to which this model maximizes benefits while reducing economic, social, and environmental damage, and creates value not only for the company and its customers but also for various stakeholder groups. The main part of the article is a systematic identification of the opportunities and challenges associated with the new proposal. These are discussed according to the key elements of the sustainable business model, which are: the value proposition, value creation and value capture.