The Role of Value Proposition and Value Co-Production in New Internet Startups: How New Venture e-Businesses Achieve Competitive Advantage

Many of the successful e-businesses during the era didn\´t necessarily possess the original idea. Some of them duplicated their predecessors\´ ideas and then re-implement them with more advanced technologies and resonating value propositions to create value for their users, and successfully "captured" the value of the original ideas from its predecessors. Once the entrepreneurs in e-business gain marginal advantage over their competitors, they seek to widen the lead by building effective value co-production mechanisms. The issues raised above are what entrepreneurial strategists would concern: How a successful new venture in network economy should do to create, protect and appropriate value? The purpose of the present paper is to emphasize the role of value proposition and value co-production in new venture development. Value proposition, which has been a buzzword among managers in the real world for a while, is actually new concept to the academic world as well as value co-production. This paper argues that a properly constructed value proposition is essential to the value creation process in e-business, and value co-production is the building blocks for value protection mechanism in network economy. The discussion of value creation and value appropriation in e-business won\´t be complete unless the two concepts are included.