Basic Definitions

A value chain is a set of activities that a company operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a valuable product or service for the market.

The concept comes from business management and was first described by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

In a broad sense, the value creation system covers the entire business ecosystem and includes the value-added chains of:

• Suppliers (and the suppliers' suppliers all the way back to the beginning of the chain)
• The company itself
• The marketing channels
• The company's customers (and supposedly extend to the product consumers up to end users)

Schematically, the value-added chains of the company and business ecosystem are represented in the following figure:

Analyzing the existing business models, we identified the key elements of the value-added chain that change in the process of improvement: