Project management has traditionally been focused on delivering outputs, such as products (Atkinson, 1999), with a specific focus on delivering on time, on budget, and to a defined quality, which is often articulated as adhering to the ‘iron triangle’ (Andersen, 2008). However, this focus on product creation is problematic because delivering a product does not necessarily imply value creation for the base organization(s) (Winter and Szczepanek, 2008). In a wider view on the management of projects (Morris, 1994), we also see a shift from a sole focus on product creation to a holistic focus on both product and value creation (Winter et al., 2006a), and over the past few years scholars have paid more attention to value creation and the realization of benefits in projects (e.g., Winter et al., 2006b; Zwikael and Smyrk, 2012).

Considering value in project contexts is nothing new, though; it has been done in value management (European Standard, 12973-2000, 2000; Quartermain, 2002) for many years.

The terms value and benefits are sometimes used interchangeably, and there appear to be many overlapping and ambiguous concepts such as value (Morris, 2013), benefits (Chih and Zwikael, 2015; Peppard et al., 2007), worth (Zwikael and Smyrk, 2012), success (Yu et al., 2005), and also value creation (Andersen, 2014; Winter et al., 2006a), benefits management (Ward and Daniel, 2012), and benefits realization management (Bradley, 2010). The aim of this paper is to take stock of what we know about the field of project value creation, to provide a comprehensive overview of the most salient concepts within project value creation, to present directions for future research to stimulate convergence on the terminology and conceptualization of project value creation, and provide implications for practice. We thus formulated the following research questions: (1) What are the main topics and debates in the literature on project value creation? (2) How may value and project value creation be conceptualized? and (3) How can future research expand this field of research?