From Value Chains to Value Constellations

The dominant framework for analyzing value creation in business strategy has long been Porter’s (1985) value chain model, which conceptualizes the firm as a sequential set of primary and support activities through which inputs are transformed into outputs, each stage incrementally contributing to the margin delivered to the final customer. This model proved enormously influential not only as an analytical device but as a normative template for organizational design: it encouraged firms to identify the activities in which they possessed comparative advantage and to outsource or minimize those in which they did not. Its underlying logic is fundamentally linear, bounded, and internalist. This linear conception of value creation has been progressively challenged on multiple fronts. Transaction cost economics extended the analysis to inter-firm relationships (Williamson, 1985), while network theories demonstrated that value frequently emerges from relational configurations rather than from activities performed in isolation (Gulati et al., 20002). The concept of the value system acknowledged interdependence but preserved a fundamentally sequential logic. The shift toward platform-based competition, ecosystem governance, and data-intensive coordination has made such linearity analytically insufficient. This chapter argues that the widespread adoption of AI compels a more fundamental reconceptualization: from value chains to what this work terms value constellations. The metaphor is deliberately chosen to convey a configuration in which multiple nodes, i.e., firms, platforms, algorithms, consumers, and institutional actors, generate and capture value through multilateral, often non-sequential interactions. Drawing on ecosystem theory (Jacobides et al., 2018), platform economics (Parker et al., 20163; Rochet & Tirole, 20034), and the emerging literature on AI-mediated coordination (Agrawal et al., 20185; Magni & Baroncelli, 2025), the chapter develops an analytical framework for understanding how AI reconfigures the architecture of value creation.