A value shop is an organization designed to solve customer or client problems, rather than creating value by producing output from an input of raw materials. The principles of value shops were first conceptualized by Thompson in 1967, and properly defined by Charles B. Stabell and Øystein D. Fjeldstad of the

Norwegian School of Management BI Norwegian Business School () is a Norwegian specialized university that provides education and conducts research primarily in the fields of business and economics, marketing, strategy, management, and administration. BI is organized as a self ...

in 1998, who also created the name. Compared to

Michael Porter Michael Eugene Porter (born May 23, 1947) is an American businessman and professor at Harvard Business School. He was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte) and FSG, a social impact consultancy. ...

's concept of the

value chain A value chain is a progression of activities that a business or firm performs in order to deliver goods and services of Value (economics), value to an end customer. The concept comes from the field of business management and was first described ...

, there is no sequential fixed set of activities or resources utilized to create value. Each problem is treated uniquely and activities and resources are allocated specifically to cater to the problem in question. According to the research of Stabell and Fjeldstad, the value configuration analysis (1998), five main generic activities are carried out in the organization: * Problem Finding and acquisition * Problem Solving * Choice of problem solution * Execution of solution * Control and evaluation Value is created in the shop by several mechanisms allowing the organization to solve problems better or faster than the client. These are variables such as: * The organization is in possession of more information about the problem than the client * The organization is specialized to deal with the problem at hand with specific methods to cover analysis * Strong expertise with expert professionals is available. Some of the classical examples of value shops include management consultancies such as

Boston Consulting Group Boston Consulting Group, Inc. (BCG) is an American global management consulting firm founded in 1963 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the "Big Three (management consultancies), Big Three" (or MBB, the world's three large ...

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Deloitte is a Multinational corporation, multinational professional services network based in London, United Kingdom. It is the largest professional services network in the world by revenue and number of employees, and is one of the Big Four a ...

and

McKinsey McKinsey & Company (informally McKinsey or McK) is an American multinational strategy and management consulting firm that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. Founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey ...

. The value shop concept has also been applied to a number of other activities including Norwegian police investigations (e.g. Gottschalk, 2007) and the knowledge-intensive energy exploration business (Woiceshyn and Falkenberg, 2008).

References

* Gottschalk, P. (2007) "Predictors of Police Investigation Performance: An Empirical Study of Norwegian Police as Value Shop". ''International Journal of Information Management'', 27, 36-48. * Stabell, C.B., and Fjeldstad, Ø.D. (1998) "Configuring Value for Competitive Advantage: On Chains, Shops, and Networks", ''Strategic Management Journal'', 19, 413-437. * Thompson, J.D. (1967) ''Organizations in Action''. McGraw Hill: New York. * Woiceshyn, J. and Falkenberg, L. (2008) "Value-creation in Knowledge Based Firms: Aligning Problems and Resources". ''Academy of Management Perspectives'', 22, 2, 85-99. {{DEFAULTSORT:Value Shop Value proposition

See also

References