The Value Co-Creation Strategy for Telecommunication Carriers: Focusing on the Assessment of Potential Strategic Alliance Partners

The telecommunications market is experiencing a new paradigm of convergence as voice, data, broadcasting, and communication is being used into a new form of service. With this paradigm shift, telecommunications companies will compete under a unified set of broadband wireless multimedia services in the next generation network(NGN) environment(e.g., 5G or beyond 5G), while existing networks provided individual services tailor specifically to their networks. In this situation, one business player cannot provide all kinds of telecommunications services by oneself, instead it might be trying to integrate or collaborate with other companies in the integrated value chain as value co-creation strategies. Unfortunately, however, there are few specific guide lines in deciding their strategic directions; which partner can give us a competitive advantage to support next generation services and what should be preemptive? Therefore, this paper suggests the new strategic framework, called Value Co-Creation Framework (VCF), as the guideline for evaluating and selecting strategic alliance partners to the telecommunications companies in the NGN era. Finally, we provide an example of partner assessment for the major wireless carrier in Korean Telecommunications market and provide the insightful implications.