Resource interaction: Key concepts, relations and representations

Value co-creation is a core focus area in both B2B marketing and strategy research, necessitating resource utilization within and across organizational boundaries. In the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group, scholars have focused on the interactions among resources as one important way to analyze central questions about resources in business relationships and networks. This has produced a breadth of investigations and concepts that are locally defined and utilized. This may hamper further theoretical development and inhibit analytical precision. The purpose of this paper is to develop a more general shared understanding of resource interaction by identifying and explicating the key concepts used, and to assess its status as an approach. The paper synthesizes 20 years of research to identify key concepts and the relationships across concepts. This provides both a platform for further conceptual and empirical research within IMP and potential for cross-fertilization with parallel B2B areas.