THE FUTURE ROLE OF THE BUSINESS SCHOOL: A VALUE COCREATION PERSPECTIVE

Exploring value co-creation resonates with the ongoing debate concerning how business schools create value for their stakeholders. We suggest that the service-dominant logic (SDL) allows us to shed light on these concerns and advance this debate. In SDL, value creation is an emergent process, and co-production, co-creation and value-in-use are central dimensions in this process. This focus on process represents a departure from the traditional business schools' position, which conceptualizes value as an output. Some schools have begun to embrace process through collaborative engagement such as engaged scholarship, service-learning or the public value model. however, SDL allows us to demonstrate that these approaches tend to focus on co-production and miss opportunities to extend value creation activities by engaging with a more diverse set of stakeholders as part of the value creation process. We contend that business schools' strategies need to shift towards developing more direct and intense interaction with their stakeholders. In so doing, they can help support, create and maintain unique value in use for these stakeholders on an ongoing basis.