The concept of degrowth aims fundamentally at reducing material and energy throughput equitably, while questioning the desirability of further economic growth. In order to achieve this reduction of society’s throughput, radical changes in the ways goods and services are produced, distributed and used are required. In this think piece, concepts of consumer integration into the value creation process and (new) enabling technologies are discussed as possible constituting elements of alternative organizational models in a degrowth society. To date, collaborative value creation concepts, such as crowdsourcing and mass customization, have been discussed almost exclusively as business model patterns for companies in economies that are set to grow. The same applies to the assessment of (new) technologies, such as additive manufacturing, web-based user interfaces for co-creation, and other flexible production technologies that allow for collaborative and individualized production. Potential positive and negative effects of these concepts and technologies with regard to the objectives of degrowth are discussed in order to initiate a debate about the inclusion of CVC for the design of alternative organizational models that are in line with degrowth thinking. This think piece illustrates that several elements of collaborative value creation and its enabling technologies coincide with degrowth objectives but do not lead per se to their attainment. Thereby, a starting point for future (empirical) work in this area is generated.

This study experimentally investigates the effects of vendor-specific guarantees and customer reviews (1) on the formation of initial consumers’ trust—separating institutional and competence trust—and (2) on first-time consumers’ intentions to buy. In addition, we examine how differing levels of online shopping experience moderate the relationship between trust and consumers’ intentions to buy. The empirical results of the study reveal the relative effectiveness of the two vendor mechanisms, with vendor-specific guarantees having a more positive effect on institutional trust and customer reviews on competence trust. While our results also show that initial trust is a central concept in explaining consumers’ intentions to buy, we find that this relationship is more pronounced for competence trust in case when consumers are more experienced with online shopping. Meanwhile, institutional trust seems a necessary prerequisite for both experienced and inexperienced online shoppers to actually buy from an unfamiliar vendor. Our study provides important managerial implications that are of interest to online vendors, especially for newly established or unknown web-based businesses.

This paper brings together firm-level research on business models and industry-level research on value migration to examine patterns of business model innovation. We draw on qualitative data from 14 cases and 68 interviews in the computer and telecommunications industries to demonstrate how business model innovation is sensitive to industry-wide forces of value migration. Based on our analysis we conclude that when value is rapidly migrating across industries and between firms, proactively substituting key elements of the primary business model provides a better fit with the new value landscape than launching secondary business models in parallel. We suggest four underlying mechanisms that link business model innovation, value migration and subsequent outcomes. Unpacking business model innovation allows us to discuss contingencies for the main business model strategies, specifically in terms of limitations to—and opportunities of—changing the primary business model and the practice of parallel business models