Book 2013 Chapter 8
Corbel, P. « Le concept de chaîne de valeur dans l’économie de la connaissance : une réflexion sur ses limites et son potentiel d’évolution » in P. Hermel and P. Corbel, Le management des évolutions organisationnelles et stratégiques, L’Harmattan, February 2013, pp. 225-245
Introduction:
The concept of the value chain originated, at least in its most common meaning in strategic management, in the mid-1980s under the pen of M. Porter. It enabled him to go beyond a simple analysis in terms of the competitive environment to look at the way in which a company could capture part of the value created by its activities and generate a margin in relation to the costs generated by these activities. Porter divided these activities into primary functions, aimed at providing customers with the goods or services concerned, and support functions, aimed at improving the efficiency of these primary functions. The primary functions being logistics, production, marketing and service, we can see that the underlying vision of the company is that of a 'classic' company, rather industrial, and creating value through the manufacture and sale of its products.
Since then, however, the economic and institutional environment has changed considerably. Many companies have refocused on their core strategic competencies, gradually outsourcing a significant proportion of their primary functions. At the same time, everyone agrees on the importance of knowledge and information activities in this new context. In other words, in the field of strategy, attention is focusing more on design functions and the information system.
The aim of this article is to situate the value chain concept in the new business environment at the beginning of the 21st century. Is it an outdated concept, symbolising the gradual replacement of the Porterian approach by the key concepts of the Resource-Based View (RBV) or the relational approach (Dyer and Singh, 1998)? Or is it still capable of making substantial contributions to strategic analysis, provided that the effects of these recent developments are incorporated?
We will see that the basic principle of the concept is adaptable to a knowledge-based economy. After a brief summary of the benefits and limitations of the value chain approach, we propose the concept of a knowledge-based value chain. We develop its potential benefits and limitations. We then propose an initial reflection on the relationship between the two concepts.