Co-Opetition - Adam M. Brandenburger [16]
No doubt there’s more to say about the Value Net for a university. The larger point is that drawing the Value Net for your business is a valuable exercise. You may already know the business inside out. Drawing your Value Net requires you to understand your customers’ and suppliers’ perspectives: you’ll be forced to know the business “outside in,” too.
Multiple Perspectives
So far we’ve been surfing the Value Net from only one vantage point. You put yourself in the middle and then look around to your customers, suppliers, competitors, and complementors. Of course, that’s not the whole game. There are also your customers’ customers, your suppliers’ suppliers, your competitors’ competitors, your complementors’ complementors, and the list goes on. For example, recruiters who come to hire graduating students are a university’s customers’ customers.
You could try to draw an extended Value Net to represent these extended relationships, but it would quickly become a mess. The better way is to draw multiple nets. Draw a separate Value Net from each perspective: your customers’, your suppliers’, your competitors’, and your complementors’, and, perhaps, from perspectives even further removed. For example, drawing your customers’ Value Net might help you find a way to increase the demand for whatever your customer sells. Helping your customer this way helps you, too.
4. Playing Multiple Roles
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts …
—Shakespeare, As You Like It
People play many parts in the game of business. That makes the game a lot more complicated. Sometimes you see someone occupying one role and forget to ask what other roles that person plays. Other times you can’t seem to fit someone into any particular role at all and then discover that’s because that person is playing two or more roles simultaneously. The Value Net enables you to sort through all this tangle.
We’ve already seen some examples of how players can occupy more than one role in the Value Net. From the perspective of American Airlines, Delta is both a competitor and a complementor. American and Delta compete for passengers, landing slots, and gates, but complement each other when commissioning Boeing to build a new plane.14 For American, it would be a mistake to view Delta solely as a competitor or solely as a complementor—Delta plays both roles.
It’s the norm for the same player to occupy multiple roles in the Value Net. Strategy experts Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad give an example in Competing for the Future: “On any given day AT&T might find Motorola to be a supplier, buyer, competitor, or partner.”15 It won’t be too long before electric utilities use their lines to transmit voice and data along with electricity. At that point, they will become competitors to the phone companies. But that hasn’t stopped Southern New England Telephone and Northeast Utilities from becoming complementors today: the two companies run phone and electric wires over a common set of poles, enabling both to save money.
In the nonprofit sector, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York compete for visitors, members, and curators as well as for paintings and funding. Still, it’s not all competition. The option to visit several museums in a weekend helps bring people into New York. Thus, the Guggenheim is a complementor as well as a competitor to MOMA. Perhaps the museums should create a joint weekend pass, a common practice in many European cities. (Since this book came out, MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum, and the American Museum