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To co-create or not to co-create? Joint Offering Evaluation Framework (JOEF) guides when considering whether to co-create with complementary companies.

Leila Saari & Minna Räikkönen

For a single IT solution provider, the customer needs and expectations can be huge, and one company might not have all resources nor competences needed for the full delivery. Joint offering is a concept or a solution that is co-created in collaboration with two or more actors that usually have complementary technological skills or value creation logics.

Several questions might roll in mind when considering the pros and cons of a joint offering. Those might be related to the potential use case, joint solution to be co-created, resources skills needed to deliver the joint solution, partners, business value creation as well as elements of contract and the ownership of the outcome, just to mention a few.

To discover these issues, we developed and launched the preliminary Joint Offering Evaluation Framework (JOEF). It supports the decision-making before initiating joint offering development by laying out guidelines, checklists and tools, and making it easier to calculate or forecast the co-creation objectives defined in business terms. JOEF includes both the Playbook (pptx, Figure 1) and the Business Value Toolset (xlsm, Figure 2). The Playbook offers viewpoints and tools for IT solution providers considering collaboration and co-creation towards an industrial use cases that they cannot deliver or sell alone. The Business Value Toolset evaluates and illustrates a joint offering from the viewpoints of both business value creation and delivery, and business value capture and assessment.

The JOEF increases the understanding of the business opportunities and risks of joint offerings as well as the mechanisms and benefits of value networks in the joint offering development. The JOEF also comprises the analyses and the estimations of revenue potential and cost impacts of joint offerings as well as the identification of the most promising business models for joint offerings from the business perspective.

Practically, the JOEF helps companies to consider all relevant aspects related to the joint offering before any decisions are taken. The benefits of JOEF are

  • Provides structured and transparent information to support decision-making and thus reduces decision uncertainty
  • Supports expert group discussions in the meetings
  • Supports product and service development
  • Provides baseline for identifying and measuring benefits of joint offerings
  • Guides how to establish a sustainable collaboration network
  • Increases understanding on economic relation and opportunities of joint offerings
  • Prepares for future market requirements
  • Supports marketing, branding and communication
  • Supports new business creation.

The developers wish to thank all experts in companies and researchers for giving valuable feedback during the development phase. We are also eager to experiment JOEF with an industrial joint offering case. Feel free to contact us!

Leila Saari leila.saari@vtt.fi
Minna Räikkönen minna.raikkonen@vtt.fi

Räikkönen, M., Saari, L., Valkokari, K., Rantala, A., & Kortelainen, H. (Accepted/In press). Creating value and business benefits from joint offerings in the capital-intensive industries. In Proceedings of the 15th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management Springer.

Saari, L., Valkokari, K. Joint offering(s) for Joint success, Blog at SEED ecosystem, 2021.