Stakeholder shared value creation: a strategic analysis of academic publishing and UK higher education in the context of developing digital technologies

The purpose of this research is to critically examine how Academic Publishers and UK Higher Education Institutions (HEI) can work together to co-create value for their ‘consumer’(end-user) within the evolving digital environment. Digital technologies can be disruptive and their use can affect all stakeholders in the value chain. Although the end user of digital resources in HEIs is the ‘student’, all associated stakeholders will also be carefully examined, as it is evident throughout the main study that each stakeholder
contributes significantly to maintaining the value chains and all have capacity to collaborate to create shared value. These stakeholders include editors at academic publishers, HEI lecturers (academics), librarians and learning technology staff. Even though all the stakeholders are interlinked in one way or another, it is not clear as to how each of the stakeholders can jointly add value throughout. The literature shows that there is little collaboration at present (with the exception of academics working as authors), due, to the
distinct and different focuses of publishers (commercial) and HEIs (education). Although they share one common goal, which is to deliver teaching and learning excellence to enhance student learning, there is little collaboration to ensure value for students, educators and publishers.

The research uses stakeholder theory, value creation, services-dominant logic (SDL) and value chain theory to examine current practice and to develop ideas for potential future practice. The aims, objectives and research questions have been derived from a preliminary reading of various literatures to develop a new empirically based guide for future academic publishing strategy that provides value for the ‘consumer’ (end-user), as well as for the publisher and HEI.

This is a developmental paper based on the findings of the literature review and pilot study. The pilot study found that costs/budgets and transparency are key factors. Publishers tend to be protective of their own interests (understandably) and are quite careful about what they say. The primary research is now under way and the results will be available for presentation at the conference.