The innovation of the value capture: insights from the sharing economy

Despite value capture is one of the three core processes of the business model of every organization, many of them might struggle to find the proper one, as capturing value is often much more difficult than creating it (Bock and George, 2018). This emerges as being particularly true for sharing economy companies, where the growing number do not correspond to the length of the lifespan these platforms enjoy (Plenter et al., 2017; Tauscher and Kietzman, 2017). Sharing economy companies provide the infrastructure through which individuals and eventually companies can access or share existing resources and assets in exchange of monetary and non-monetary benefits (Mair and Reischauer, 2017). While capturing value is a quite straightforward process for traditional companies that simply charge the customers for the value created (Kohler, 2015), it becomes much harder for this kind of platforms where the value comes from the increased use of idle capacity, and is often largely created by the users themselves. The purpose of this research stems from these premises and is focused on exploring the patterns and the paths of value capture innovation in sharing economy platforms. To achieve these goals a two steps methodology was applied, combining retrospective data and real-time detection of the innovation process.