KIBS purchasing: triadic relationships and end-user value perceptions

Authors: Daiane Ribeiro; Juliana Bonomi Santos; Simona D’Antone

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are services delivered to other organizations that have individuals’ knowledge as the main productive resource (Muller &amp Doloreux, 2009). The productive process of KIBS starts with a specific customer need. The demanding organization usually needs improving some of its characteristics and uses external know-how to do so (Jaakkola &amp Halinen, 2006). KIBS providers and their customers then interact intensively during the service delivery to co-create a solution together (Lehrer, Ordanini, DeFillippi, &amp Miozzo, 2012). The literature on the co-creation of KIBS has usually adopted a dyadic perspective, focusing on the relationship between customers and providers (e.g. Bettencourt et al., 2002 Correcher, Cusmano, &amp Morrison, 2009 Xue &amp Field, 2010). Increasingly, however, attention is being dedicated to the role the purchasing department plays in intermediating these transactions and the triadic relationships that emerge between the supplier company on one side, and the purchasing and end-user functions in the customer firm (D´Antone &amp Santos, 2016 Longsdale, Hoque, Kirkpatrick &amp Sanderson, 2017 Wynstra et al., 2015). The literature, has acknowledged that the interactions amongst these three actors create considerable opportunity for value creation (Lindgreen et al, 2009 Möller, 2006 Walter et al, 2001). However, there has been scant attention to the way KIBS interactions between these three actors generate and affect value creation.

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Publish Year: 2018

Conference: Marseille, France (2018)