نقشه برداری از ارزش ها در روابط B2B: دیدگاه مبتنی بر دانش سیستماتیک

The management of an enduring relationship between provider and supplier has at its heart an implicit interaction between the valuation systems of the counterparts. We take the view that this interaction is conveniently understood through the lens of knowledge management. Knowledge management informs our treatment of business to business relationships through two mechanisms. It helps us manage better the dissemination and co-creation of knowledge in an organisation and new work in the mapping of knowledge allows us to represent the knowledge aspects of a relationship in a way which allows us to manage it better. We present, therefore, an approach to allow the specific representation of these valuation systems and their interaction, using a case study of the marketing of a nuclear submarine programme to a government. A conclusion is that structures which support the co-creation of knowledge between the companies is critical to winning the contract and we indicate how this co-creation can be engendered.

Marketing is a member of a large class of human activities which seek to match the output of a provider with a predicted, perceived demand. Business-to-business (from now on B2B) marketing has, in particular, the characteristic that, with few exceptions, the provider seeks to establish an enduring relationship with the buyer (Ford, 1997; Håkansson, Johanson, & Wootz, Håkansson et al., 1976 and Turnbull and Valla, 1986). Certainly it imbues more cooperation and collaboration than the more general B2C case and hence we adhere to the term ‘provider’ as more accurate here than ‘customer’ (Ritter & Ford, 2004). Marketing then becomes very distinct from the act of selling (Gummesson, 2002), since its focus of attention is on the satisfaction felt by the buyer (and indeed by the provider) in continuing and enacting the relationship (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Within this almost ubiquitous framing of B2B marketing as a relationship issue, this paper assumes, specifically, the network understanding of marketing where the effects and implications of dyadic company-to-company relationships (for example technology exchange) occurs in a distributed, wider multi-agent structure characterised as a network. These dyadic relationships between firms, then, expressed within the wider network are characterised by being multi-agent, episodic in nature, interactive, not standardised and distributed in nature (Ford, Gadde, Håkansson, & Snehota, 2003 — pp 6 and 227–228). It will be seen later that these characteristics place particular demands upon the supporting tools and schemata used by managers of these networks. It is the purpose of this paper to present a practical way of representing, and hence aiding the understanding of the specific relationship of a firm with its encompassing network in order to satisfy these particular demands. The second assumption made in this paper is that the emergent behaviour of the network as a whole (as a result of management within it, particularly of the constituent inter-firm dyads), is a matter of and the outcome of knowledge management (hereafter KM). This does not imply that no other lens is valid; merely that such a perspective, whereby the relationship is conveniently and effectively understood to be enacted and reified by the knowledge conveyed in its discourse, is an important, unifying and productive one. When firms interact in an attempt to reconcile, jointly and severally, the needs implied by their valuation systems, knowledge is exchanged and, indeed co-created about the other's valuations. Moreover, particularly in a technological industry, the exchange of knowledge is the most significant bearer of the commitment so central to the social network model which informs our understanding of B2B network relationships (Cook & Emerson, 1978). The view taken here is that the act of marketing is, at heart, the interaction between two valuation systems. We mean by this the set of attributes emergent from the relationship which are valued by each party and the nature of the mutual interaction of these attributes. For example, one firm may value greatly the transfer or co-creation of technical knowledge relevant to a developing product line while the dyadic partner may value short term cash flow and reflected reputation gained by working with a more strongly branded partner. This is in contradistinction with a second, common interpretation of ‘value system’ as the totality of the inherent, underlying values of the firm and its constituents. We make no claim to throw light on these moral and ethical underpinnings of the members of the firm; here ‘valuation system’ is to be understood as the embodiment in the moment of the permanent set of ‘things we stand for’ which are underpinned by the ‘value system’ in this second sense ( Glynn, 2007, Stryker, 1980 and Stryker, 2000). For example, one firm may, because of its commercial and market circumstances, be motivated to place great and continuing value on its skills and competence, its ability to create innovative technologies, processes and products. The valuation system of such a firm would then constitute a listing of those attributes valued together with some representation of how they interact. For example, there are clear connections between competencies, skills, training investment, ability to innovate and differentiation in the market place. The firm needs to know and, further, needs to be able to express the interconnections of its valuation system, because it is the performance of this very system which is the focus of the whole of the management of the firm, since what are we managing if it is not that which we value (Burt, 1992)? This idea of dyadic interaction being a matter of interaction of valuation systems is inherent in much of the network literature (Brusoni, Prencipe, & Pavitt, 2001). After a brief discussion of the implications of this network and knowledge perspective on management of B2B relations the paper illustrates the use of a particular method, deriving from the systems and KM fields and then, through the medium of a case study, the appropriateness of the technique (known as System-based Knowledge Management (Powell & Swart, 2006), or SBKM) is indicated. We then make observations on the knowledge management issues illuminated by the case study and in particular on the rôle of co-creation mechanisms in creating network knowledge.

We see that as the MOD withdraws support from the home market, the experience of RRA in the long term declines, since their designers become less au fait with the needs of the complex system. Thus they have less to bring to the conversation within a project. In turn this leads to an INCREASE in the heterogeneity of the team: the VSEL designers have much integration expertise but the RRA designers are tending to bring only NSRP knowledge. Hence the demarcation within the project is more visible and, perhaps counter-intuitively, the worth of sharing the disparate knowledge increases. Hence the VSEL designers take more from the knowledge environment for their part and their ability to govern the project risk thereby goes up. In short, over a long period of time the effect is to stabilize the relationship between the two firms; as cooperation operates, heterogeneity decreases and it becomes less worthwhile to work together — we see the platform supplier becoming more confident in its relationship with the MOD customer, but as the RRA specialists work separately they establish greater heterogeneity and it became once more, worthwhile for VSEL to work with them. In terms of relationship strategy the conclusion is obvious — RRA should, to the extent that it sees a joint submarine product emerging from a long term relationship with VSEL, ensure that in periods when it is in contact with VSEL its engineers are absorbing the maximum amount of submarine knowledge while, when the two firms are not working together, RRA should embrace enthusiastically the specialist expertise of nuclear engineering in order the better to be valued by VSEL in the later and inevitable cooperative stage. We see again that the effect of a market statement by the customer affects in a very direct way those variables which represent the valuation system of the two contracting firms. SBKM, however, allows more than a generalized approach to be taken to the management of knowledge between firms in such B2B relationships, since it allows a more precise, procedural approach to the KM aspects of the system. Fig. 9 shows how actors can be attached to Fig. 8 in order to show which agents are controlling the strength of connection between the important causal links of Fig. 8. Actors in the procurement authority or national government are given Greek letters while actors in the two firms carry Roman letters.