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The paper aims to offer a five‐step method for discovering a customer's particular strategic needs based on a unique application of value‐chain analysis.

The paper presents a five‐step approach. Step 1 explains how internal and external value chains can be used separately and in related ways. Step 2 shows how to construct a customer's value chain. Step 3 shows how to identify the customer's business strategy by examining this value chain and using other kinds of information. Step 4 explains how to use additional information and intelligence to leverage that understanding into strategic needs and priorities. Step 5 explains how a firm's marketing function can best use this method of value‐chain analysis as a new strategic capability.

The benefits for doing this analysis on important customers include: identifying new high value business opportunities (and improving revenue); and strengthening the business‐to‐business (B2B) customer relationship: clarifying their strategic priorities allows enhanced alignment of actions with desired results.

A value‐chain analysis – combined with other kinds of information –is key to discovering the B2B customers' strategic needs and creating new business that will not only get a receptive audience but also command premium margins.

For B2B service companies, it is the external value chain that presents many new opportunities for business growth. Even though these processes occur outside the corporation, the strategic opportunities they reveal and areas of risk they highlight warrant careful study.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the importance of a strategic approach to collaborative innovation and the use of a value chain research methodology for identifying opportunities for co‐innovation.

Value chain analysis is used to map three flows in the Houston Farms value chain; material flow, information flow and relationships. Having diagnosed the current level of co‐innovation we then identify improvement projects and opportunities for co‐innovation to reduce cost and add value, for the benefit of the value chain as a whole.

The application of the value chain analysis methodology to the Houston Farms value chain revealed the importance of strategy and robust processes in key areas for co‐innovation – R&D and new product development. It also revealed that small businesses can enjoy a degree of success as a result of comparative advantage in certain areas but that sustainable competitive advantage cannot occur by chance – identifying the potential for co‐innovation is an important first step in the right direction.

The value chain innovation roadmap represents a useful framework for exploring the current state and future capability for co‐innovation in a value chain. The value chain analysis methodology is an effective diagnostic tool as it focuses on what happens at the interface between stakeholders and how this relates to what final consumers regard as value adding, rather than traditional financial and functional KPIs which make it difficult to explore the competitiveness of the value chain as a whole.

The explicit and objective measurement of what consumers value is an important addition to the value chain analysis methodology and the co‐innovation roadmap is an original attempt to illustrate the core drivers and capabilities for achieving co‐innovation in a value chain. The insights from the case demonstrate the value of this approach to companies who are open to innovation and recognise the need to focus the use of scarce value‐adding resources on specific value chains and the needs and wants of final consumers therein.

Value chain analyses that help businesses build competitive advantage must include considerations of unpredictable shocks and stressors that can create costly business disruptions. Enriching value chain analysis with considerations of system resilience, meaning the ability to recover and adapt after adverse events, can reduce the imposed costs of such disruptions.

The paper provides a perspective on resilience as both an expansion and complement of risk analysis. It examines applications of both concepts within current value chain literature and within supply chain literature that may inform potential directions or pitfalls for future value chain investigations. Established frameworks from the broader field of resilience research are proposed for value chain resilience analysis and practice.

The synthesis reveals a need to expand value chain resilience analysis to incorporate phases of system disruption. Current explorations in the literature lack an explicit acknowledgement and understanding of system-level effects related to interconnectedness. The quantification methods proposed for value chain resilience analysis address these gaps.

Using broader resilience conceptualizations, this paper introduces the resilience matrix and three-tiered resilience assessment that can be applied within value chain analyses to better safeguard long-term business feasibility despite a context of increasing threats.

The analysis of the concept of resilience in supply chain management studies mostly focuses on the downstream side of the value chain and tacitly assumes an unlimited supply of raw materials. This assumption is unreasonable for agricultural value chains, as upstream disruptions clearly have a material impact on the availability of raw materials, and indeed, are a common source of supply problems. This paper aims to present a framework for the operationalisation of the concept of socioecological resilience in agricultural value chains that incorporates upstream activities.

A citation network analysis was adopted to review articles. A conceptual framework is then advanced to identify elements of resilience and indicators relevant to tropical agricultural value chains.

There are limited studies that assess resilience in the food chain context. Flexibility, collaboration, adaptability and resourcefulness are key elements for assessing resilience at the individual chain actor level. However, the paper argues that adaptability is the relevant element for the assessment of resilience at an aggregate food system level because it considers the alteration of a system’s state of resilience.

The proposed framework and propositions accommodate stakeholder interactions in the value chain and could serve as a tool to guide the assessment of resilience in agricultural value chains.

This paper is one of the few to extend resilience to cover the socioecological interaction aspects for supply chains that yield the raw materials needed for continuity in channel-wide value creation processes.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical success factors of emblematic hotels from the perspective of the guest, by analysing the direct activities that make up the value chain of these types of establishments.

The authors use the case study methodology to derive conclusions that contribute to the development of a theory about the success factors of emblematic hotels. The case selected is the Spanish Tourist Parador chain. The authors carried out over a period of two years a data mining analysis of the online comments posted by its guests.

The results indicate that the attributes of location and facilities are critical success factors expected a priori given the nature of the business of such establishments, based on the singular nature of the buildings. Another critical success factor is personnel, which seems to indicate that the Paradors support their business model by employing highly qualified staff, but give less attention to restaurant services or the room, according to guest perceptions.

The paper provides required evidence on the critical success factors of emblematic hotels adapting Porter’s value chain, for the tourism accommodation sector, through the analysis of direct value chain activities. In addition, the existing literature is broadened by taking a perspective scarcely studied, the guest perception of hotel establishments, online content posted by the user on the establishment’s website, rather than simply considering the traditional views of the experts/managers, through structures questionnaires. Besides, the results provide practical and useful implications for the managements of the emblematic hotels under study.

This paper aims at enriching the literature on international business (IB) studies to include insights from Global Value Chain (GVC) analysis to better explain how MNCs can orchestrate a global network organization. A first important contribution of the GVC literature is that it shifts the focus from single firms to their value chains, providing instruments to study how activities are split and organized among different firms at the industry level, and how MNCs can implement different governing mechanisms within a network-based setting. The GVC literature also highlights that retailers (as global buyers) often act as ‘lead firms’ in shaping the trajectories of global industries, while IB studies have so far focused predominantly on manufacturing firms. A fine-grained analysis of alternative forms of governance characterizing value chains can offer additional elements in explaining how MNCs can manage their network relationships in a global scenario. Finally, through their focus on upgrading, GVC studies suggest that knowledge flows and innovation dynamics taking place within value chains are as important as those taking place within the MNC’s organizational border. We conclude by arguing that these insights can help the IB literature to examine the challenges and opportunities MNCs face in engaging with suppliers and to explain the dynamic evolution of orchestrating global activities at the global level.

The paper shows how sustainable value chain analysis (SVCA) can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify misalignment between resource allocation and consumer preferences, using a case study of the Oxford Landing wine chain, from South Australia to the UK.

The study incorporates a combination of value chain analysis (VCA) and life cycle analysis (LCA) in a single methodology to determine which activities, at each stage in the supply chain, create value (in the eyes of consumers) and the contribution of these activities to greenhouse gas emissions.

The case study demonstrates the value of comparing the consumer value associated with a particular activity with the emissions associated with that activity, as this draws the attention of managers, at each stage of the supply chain, to the potential trade‐offs that exist and the danger of focusing on either one (adding value or reducing emissions) in isolation.

The main limitation of the research methodology is that the study focuses on a single product (Oxford Landing) and a single chain to a single country (UK). Thus, it is difficult to generalise from the results of this single case study to the (South Australian) wine industry in general, without further information from other wineries and consumer perceptions of their brands in different parts of the world.

The case study highlights the importance of taking a holistic view when considering the sustainability of a product, process or chain – trade‐offs between environmental benefits and consumer perceptions of value can have significant commercial implications. It also illustrates the potential for SVCA to be used as a guide for the allocation of research and development expenditure (public and private) in pursuit of sustainable competitive advantage.

The study is the first to combine LCA with VCA in a context that allows researchers, practitioners and policymakers to identify areas for improvement, in what they do and how they do it.

To develop an innovative methodology to apply lean value chain improvement techniques to a complete supply chain for a food product from farm to consumer.

Action research based on a UK case study involving farmers, a food processor and a major retailer.

Value stream analysis (VCA) highlights significant opportunities to improve supply chain performance, profitability and relationships.

Lean/VCA methodologies can be readily applied to the retail and processor elements of food chains. However, further research is required to apply the concepts to farm operations.

Subsequent to this research, VCA techniques have been increasingly adopted in UK agri‐food sectors including meat, dairy, cereals and horticulture.

Application of lean concepts and VCA in the agri‐food sector. Development of a multi‐echelon supply chain improvement methodology.

Over the last decade, value chain for development has shown its bias towards global value chain approaches. This article proposes a holistic framework to carry out feasibility analysis for the establishment of a value chain.

A qualitative research approach was used to collect and analyse data from a wide range of stakeholders potentially involved in establishment of a global cut-foliage value chain based on wild harvesting of ornamental ferns in New Caledonia.

Multiple feasibility analyses revealed issues that need to be addressed, priorities for different stakeholders and possible ways forward in the establishment of a value chain.

The framework supports businesses, entrepreneurs, investors, donors and governments in proceeding with value chain establishment with significant consideration of social, economic and environmental drivers for sustainability.

Relevant concepts in several fields are integrated into a single framework that can guide feasibility analysis of value chain establishment.