For years, value creation has been a hot topic in both academic and business literature.  Perceptions of value and value creation have changed over time in parallel with economic changes and technological developments. In the early 21st century, we are approaching towards digital service economy where businesses and organizations are increasingly seeking new ways to benefit from business opportunities mostly enabled by the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies. However, due to the novelty and vast number of different concepts not much is known about value creation through social media and recently emerged ICT-based approaches.
The purpose of this study was to increase general understanding on social media and ICT-related value creation by exploring different novel value creation approaches in intercompany networks. The study was conducted as a qualitative business research with theoretical and empirical parts. The theoretical part consisted of an extensive literature review focusing on the two key aspects of the study: value creation and novel social media and ICT-based value creation approaches. The empirical part consisted of a multiple case study with three different cases: Konecranes GrabCAD Challenge, xTune and Kaleva Innopinion Campaign. The data was collected with a netnography including participant observations and focused interviews. The participant observations were conducted in case-related online environments and we interviewed four different persons from the case organizations.
As a result, this research identified the current trends in value creation and described how they differ from more traditional views by exploring different characteristics that epitomize novelty. The study also introduced several frameworks and models for analyzing and visualizing value creation in networked environments. In addition, the research identified several recently emerged novel value creation approaches that essentially build on social media and other ICT-based approaches, and focused more intensively on crowdsourcing, swarm-work and gamification through the case studies. In conclusion, the case studies revealed that social media and modern ICT are in essential role in enabling value creation and several characteristics of novelty in the cases