First of all, your method of linking customer value needs and industry value chain is really worth of studying.

While selecting the CSF’s, I’d recommend to interview a specialist of each part of the value chain. Then your questions could be “What is the most important success factor in this part of value chain?” or “What are the most important sources of customer value in this part of value chain?”.

As you already guessed, I have no good books to suggest. However, my good friend Mikolas found at least three good ones:
1. The New Industrial Revolution: The Power of Dynamic Value Chains
2. Harvard Business Review on Managing the Value Chain
3. Value Innovation Portfolio Management: Achieving Double-digit Growth Through Customer Value

Good luck with the thesis!

Eero

I have working on my thesis, and I am trying to determine CSFs in tourism business in Thailand. I also need some guidelines to determine what theCSFs should be in the current situation. My advisor also suggests to use the Value Chain of Guru Porter, M. I toally agree too.

I have a question, could you tell me more which book i can get more information about customer value needs in the every step of the value chain?

Match the value chain with the customer value needs, it is how we think outside the box. I think.

Kate.

Recently I’ve been studying customer value needs in the every step of the value chain. According to some theories, there is only nine customer values; not more, not less. By comparing customers’ value expectations, your proposal and your competitor’s proposal in every step you soon find new opportunities for strategic differentiation. I find it very good addition to the success factor analysis described above, but you still need to identify the critical factors to excel when serving customer values.

About one of your examples: If thinking fulfilling customer value needs, is Apple’s proposal so disruptive? I think that the proposal is not. On the contrary, it is a perfect match for the underlying needs. However, what comes to Apple’s business approach from their competitors’ point of view, it is nothing but disruptive. Competitors were rather focused to cost optimization of existing process than maximizing their effort to fully focus satisfying customer value needs within the chain. Huge difference.

While this is all good, in order to really make a difference one should also think outside the box and try to find ways to actually disrupt existing value chain in order to gain a unique position in the business. Some, somewhat tired, examples could be Apple with their content delivery platform (iTunes), Amazon with their Kindle and Google with their targeted ad network.

These all are good examples on how to gain a controlling position in a disrupted value chain and essentially have a robust model where it is practically impossible for the competition to enter the market – at least without massive investments to product development and infrastructure – something that of course can be analyzed with the traditional Porter framework.