| Summary: | In the past few decades, scholars of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group have been scrutinising inter-organisational network phenomena. Acknowledging a subjectively held world view of persons, groups and organisations, particular focus has been laid on the perceived relevance and choice of relational enactment of particular ties in these networks for creating a particular value. The IMP tradition has been scrutinising such relational collaborations' pivotal constituents of actors, resources, and activities and empirically covered phenomena of space and time therein. This thesis is about conducting further basic descriptive research (Möller and Svahn, 2003) in longitudinal case studies (Ford and Mouzas, 2010). With emphasis on R&D intensive customer-centric innovation, this project will further explore the roles of actors, their rationales for networking, and their subjectively perceived value systems (Ford, 2011). This work draws on interpretivism and s ocial constructionism, applying pragmatist meta-cycles of scrutiny. The research process is placed within the German R&D department of a a multinational high-technology corporation's. It emphasises cross-case longitudinal observation of innovation relationships in specific B2B networks. The aim is to exemplarily examine these networks' sense-making, networking activities and value systems by interacting with the networks' project members. The proceedings involve the translation of research constituents into mathematical formulae and instrumental scorecards. The exchange of products, services, and goodwill and further qualities of collaboration are differentiated and put forth for subsequent refinement of observation. Valuein- exchange and value-in-use are found interrelated. A particular quality of the intrinsic network value as postulated by Ford (2011) is substantiated and expressed in this dissertation's framework of formulae. Interestingly, the findings point to the need to further examine the role and gradual obsolescence of the juridical contract. Moreover, the concept of the "actor" is found to be a potentially ambiguous term to be refined in future research.
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