Emerging trends in Value-Creating Processes: Co-creation through Corporate Finance and S-D Logic

Service-Dominant Logic suggests the co-creation of value by abandoning a mere profit maximization approach and fostering behavior capable of involving clients and other partners as active players in service delivery. Financial performance is not considered an objective, but a relevant form of feedback from the market. In particular, financial performance could also be interpreted as evidence that value propositions have been fulfilled. Considering this, this paper will first introduce the existing relationship between S-D Logic and Ethical Finance. The proposed paradigm interpreted within corporate finance, in fact, presents a radical change in the analysis of inter-systemic relationships for the growing importance of the financial system and for the accredited role to both the customer and other monitoring entities. This seems perfectly consistent with the major events taking place in financial markets nowadays, which definitively force a great cultural change on the identification and management of relationships with financial stakeholders, surpassing the traditional approach which is profit and determined asset-sensitive and qualifying it with a wider range of service attribute combinations. We will then make a theoretical proposal focused on the identification of a set of financial performance indicators that, despite their indirect relation to financial value, are very effective identifiers, also in terms of identifying eventual corrective actions that may be carried out in the continuous and dynamic process of value propositions. Among these indicators, particular attention is dedicated to capital cost, given the implications that service-dominant logic can exert on firm risk. It seems evident, in fact, that the cost of capital is also the result of the degree of cash flow stability, in addition to a greater level of consonance with the customer that the S-D logic approach must ensure, given the continuous correlation of the firm‟s value within the market.