| Given the rapid emergence of hybrid goods–services organizations across industries (Baines and Lightfoot 2013; Shankar et al. 2009; Ulaga and Reinartz 2011), traditionally goods-oriented companies face an increasingly important business development question: what services should they invest in? Or, put more analytically, what services have the greatest impact on customer relationships? The expanding service-dominant (S-D) logic literature (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2008b) casts this question in terms of developing and applying Bresources^ to create value. According to S-D logic, value is not intrinsic to the seller’s Boperand resources^ or tangible offerings such as physical products or software coupled with training or integration. Rather, sellers deliver value to buyers by applying operant resources such as skills and knowledge to the operand resources. Vargo and Lusch (2008a) maintain that the valuemaximizing application of resources—more than the specific goods–services offering mix—should be a company’s primary marketing concern. To date, though, little quantitative analysis has been conducted to test the impact of these resources on value. Research has focused instead on classification systems (Madhavaram and Hunt 2008), consumer behavior (Arnould 2005), and conceptual integration into existing knowledge domains such as innovation theory (Michel et al. 2008). Recent qualitative studies have highlighted the importance of sellers customizing offerings and communicating value in customer-specific terms (Tuli et al. 2007; Ulaga and Reinartz 2011). But, again, the impact of such capabilities has yet to be assessed through quantitative analysis. Given the paradigmatic shift proposed by S-D logic, the first objective of our study is to quantitatively assess the extent to which both operant and operand resources affect value. We measure value in terms of project outcomes and customer relationship satisfaction. To do this we quantify relative effects both within operant resources, and between operant and operand resources, while simultaneously capturing co-creation of value. Buyers and sellers may also have very different notions of success. This is shown vividly by Tuli et al. (2007), who find suppliers viewing customer solutions from a goods/services perspective in contrast to customers viewing solutions from a relational perspective. The empirical work that does exist establishing the value of operant resources on value creation has been seller- rather than buyer-centered, and it has not included relative quantitative assessments for specific resources (Ngo and O’Cass 2009). Our second objective then is to illuminate the buyer’s perspective, analyzing the impact of a seller’s operant and operand resources on customer perceptions of value created. We do this using a holistic, end-to-end framework, which allows us to measure the relative contribution of distinctive seller resources (as perceived by the buyer) while concurrently depicting value co-creation. Our setting is the business-to-business (B2B) software industry, specifically business intelligence (BI) systems, a class of enterprise software. It is an instructive environment given that many B2B and technology companies already augment products with services to develop more complete customer solutions (Helander and Moller 2008; Kauffman and Tsai 2009). In particular, services including installation support, project management, and user training—whether delivered through a software group’s internal resources or via third parties—help customers tackle a key challenge: moving from initial adoption of a product to enterprise-wide use and benefits realization (Samli et al. 1992; Easingwood et al. 2006; Swaminathan and Moorman 2009). This type of solution selling strongly supports the S-D logic principle of Bvalue in use,^ where value is co-created by the buyer through product use (Devaraj and Kohli 2003) and by the seller through the contribution of operant resources applied in conjunction with the product (Ngo and O’Cass 2009). |