In October 2008, Andrzej Klesyk, CEO of Poland's largest insurer PZU, reflected on possible ways of resolving a decade-long cross-border shareholder conflict at his company. Owned 55% by the Polish State Treasury and 33% by the Dutch insurer Eureko as of October 2008, PZU was a highly profitable...

VOSS is a Norwegian bottled water company that produces one of the world's purest drinking waters, sold at an ultra-premium price in a sleek cylindrical glass bottle of minimalist design. In the U.S. (the company's primary market), VOSS' high-end brand presence is strongest in on-premise...

French advertising company JCDecaux and the city of Paris jointly developed Vélib, a wildly popular bicycle sharing system. Despite Vélib's public appeal, vandalism and theft led to ballooning operating costs-costs borne by JCDecaux alone. The two parties opted to renegotiate their contract,...

How do firms create and capture value in large technical systems? In this paper, I argue that the points of both value creation and value capture are the system's bottlenecks. Bottlenecks arise first as important technical problems to be solved. Once the problem is solved, the solution in...