Value creation and firm integration: First empirical insights for the software industry

Abstract

The value added created by a firm is a widely used figure. Major elements of a firm's strategy and business model deal with how the firm creates value and brings it to the customer. This paper focuses on a particular measure which has been broadly applied to measure the degree of vertical integration: value added to sales (VA/S). To our best knowledge, this measure hasn't been applied in software business research. We hence outline its application in other fields by conducting a broad and structured literature review. First empirical insights are gained by analyzing the VA/S development for 44,171 software firms in the period 2002-2009. These results indicate an increasing degree of vertical integration in the software industry. While practitioners can use the results as a benchmark for their own firms, researchers are provided with a comprehensive literature review, first empirical results on a large sample and avenues for research. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.