Conclusions

suggested situating the product in the marketplace as a new type of frame, to stop references to wood or aluminium windows, which were both misleading for customers and punitive to Woodstock. He admitted the uniqueness of the Woodstock profile and the fact that the comparison should be relative, not direct and absolute:

“Business Director: is there any way of defining a bit more objectively what is good and what is not good and what's good enough? That’s the problem we have. The samples we showed at the beginning where seen as not good enough and now they have started looking at everything with a microscope and say this is not perfect. We should say wait a minute, is that fair judgment? I think it is very subjective!

Project Manager: the normal standard in this industry is that you should look from 3 meters away. This will not be a direct competitor for aluminium, but then you should be ready to emphasize the problems of aluminium, if you were looking at the alum profile close-up, you would see defects as well, impressions and other things.

Business Director: we just make it clear to the customers thatthey shouldn’t compare itto wood, thatthey shouldn’t compare it to aluminium, it is just a category in itself and then you can do a relative comparison. Ok, this is what aluminium looks like, this is what wood looks like, and this is what our stuff looks like. Right now we don’t have the right perspective on it.

We should go for third look; we should communicate this as a new service; don’t try to persuade people this is wood and don’t make them believe it is aluminium.” (Steering meeting, 2014)

Interruptions The enactment process Outcome/enacted environment G1 expected to be a fast

and standard solution

Identifying a very fragmented market, a traditional industry Conduct market research before acting

Focused on one national market at that time

G1: complex and expensive value chain

G1 labelled as “valuable learning” Decided to stop G1, and continue with G3

Fear of the unknown regarding co-branding Disagreement points between R&D and BU

Labelled and formalized the concept internally

Creating a temporary collective agreement (temporary retention)

Need to adopt new practices: warranty - challenging ideology

Labelled as a “big challenge” for Pinta Inc., however a “must” to enter the market

Benchmarking competitors’

practice - in a search for reference points

Defining and re-defining targets

Trying to match wrong references and reaching a

“showstopper” moment Disagreement points between R&D and BU

Highlighting the need for further market research

Re-labelling parts of value proposition

Need to understand aesthetics - challenging the ideology

Benchmarking competitors’

practice

Create common quality libraries

Reaching agreement about the value proposition along the value chain and network

Label Woodstock as “3^rd look”

Table 6. 1 Enactment processes of the value proposition

Woodstock’s value proposition was the result of a collaborative process, undertaken between different manners of making sense. The company was subject to a strong discourse over identity, informed by the varying positions of the group development team (the engineers who have created Woodstock), the BU taking it over, and the customer who had exclusivity over the

product and had acted as a co-developer partner for more than four years. Given the newness of the product, the creation of the value proposition was born out of a chaos of uncertainty (Weick, 1995), where labelling and re-labelling, benchmarking, creating temporally compromises, while having a strong spoke person, were the tools employed by the development team.

Porac et al. (1989) explained that when seeking to establish itself in an industry, there is an imitative tendency; there is an ongoing input-output cycle with the environment “in which subjective interpretations of externally situated information become themselves objectified via behaviour” (Porac et al., 1989:399). The authors argued that this imitative behaviour would help construct a mental model of competitive behaviour, consisting of beliefs about the identity of the firm, and the causal beliefs about what would be required to be competitive in a new environment. When building Woodstock’s value proposition, there were continual input-output processes considered retrospectively, as well as internal practices and external practices undertaken by the windows industry. The team was challenged to create a new identity and a new meaning, as they needed to “construct actively an interpretation by linking received cues with well-learned and/or developing cognitive structures” (Porac et al., 1989:389). However, in the case of the most important decision, kill/no kill, internal cues, meaning previous practices in the company, weighed far more than external ones.

The value proposition was composed of more features, and each one of the features needed to have its own enactment process. Some of these features were defined at the beginning of the innovation process, and then re-shaped when customers sent specific cues; while other components, as with the aesthetic, were enacted continuously. These enactment processes further enacted linkages between value proposition and different other business model elements, linkages which are going to be analysed in chapter seven.

Furthermore, the team needed to understand the value proposition as an integrative part of the entire value chain, and to recognize the strong connection between the value proposition and revenue model. The lack of a mechanism to appropriate the value created through co-braining created frustration at the managerial level, as determined at the end of that type of partnership.

Thus, pricing mechanisms legitimized the existence of the core of a business model, namely the value proposition.

The process of creating a value proposition involves more than mastery of the properties set out by the technology per se. The customer, in this case the Co-creator, and pre-existing industry standards together mediated the transformation of the technology into a value proposition.

Interestingly, this was considered a problem when formulating the value proposition, rather than a solution. Thus, the actors involved needed to create meaning and enact solutions affected by the interruptions analysed above. As seen, these interruptions had a different source: appeared to result from a lack of knowledge, divergent points between paradigms, a clash between new industry standards and ideology, and a failure to create agreement, about the value offered along the entire value chain. As each paradigm had its own approach to rationalizing interruptions, the goal was not only to enact a solution, but also to compromise the terms under which these parts would agree to deliver an agreement.

An interesting observation here is that each of the components of the value proposition challenged specific elements of the business model, and these elements are all coming together under crisis situations only. This aspect is elaborated on further in chapter seven.