The e3value ontology for value networks: Current state and future directions

Meeting changing customer demands and business opportunities in a connected world makes it necessary for organizations to constantly innovate by means of value-creating collaborations. The goal of value modeling is to support the exploration of new business models from an economic point of view. The e3value approach to value modeling is based on an explicit ontology and supported by a graphical tool. This paper provides a structured overview and evaluation of e3value, and discusses two important issues. The first issue concerns the difference between a value co-creation perspective and an exchange value perspective. It shows that with some extensions, e3value can support both. The second issue is model quality. It argues that an ontology is not complete without model quality features and, as far as e3value is concerned, proposes to use the notion of “value cycle” as a soundness feature and as a replacement of the scenario concept.