Revisiting Amit and Zott’s model of value creation sources: The SymBelt Customer Center case

Amit and Zott [2] recognized the importance of understanding value sources in electronic business (ebusiness). However, the concept of e-business is rather broad and therefore this paper suggests a more narrow focus on the value of complementary services. The reason for this approach is an ever-increasing importance for firms to provide complimentary services supporting products. Amit and Zott’s [2] model of the sources of value creation in e-business includes four dimensions of value creation; efficiency, lock-in, complementarities and novelty. In contrast to Amit and Zott [2], we suggest that the four dimensions of the model should not only be used as value creation sources, but moreover as value evaluation dimensions. The findings of this case study, where Metso Paper’s Internet-based service (a complementary service) and some of their customers’ perceptions of the service have been studied, show that the customers have used the services infrequently. This study also shows that in this specific business-to-business context, the characteristics of the product, which the Internet-based service supports, are vital. Therefore, we suggest a modification of Amit and Zott’s [2] business model when used as a model for value evaluation of complementary services, to replace complementarities with nature of the core product.