Are you creating or capturing value? A dynamic framework for sustainable strategy

Is value the holy grail for every company? Definitely it is something executives, investors and researchers are interested in since decades. If we only look at 4 major strategy journals over the last 20 years (Strategic Management Journal, California Management Review, Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review), together they published 189 articles with the word value in the title, meaning that on average about every month a new article was published focusing on the concept. Yet, value is perhaps one of the most used and misused terms in the history of management literature. To say the least, a lot of confusion persists not only about the meaning of the term, even more about ways to achieve it in a sustainable way. In this article, we start from a clear distinction between value creation and valuecapturing and propose a simple and intuitive framework showing the critical role of managing the interaction and the dynamics between these two strategic imperatives for achieving sustainable success for any company. We illustrate the framework with recent data from companies across a variety of industries providing further support for the relevance of the model.