Reconceptualising stakeholders for the management of distributed value creation networks through open design-led businesses

Openly shared design knowledge and open-to-participate design processes present potential for democratising innovation through diffuse value creation networks that can diverge into different directions and design outcomes. This potential mostly concretises through the distributed production paradigm that localises production, closes material loops and empowers communities to meet their specific needs. This paper argues that there is a need for formalising truly alternative ways of doing open design-led businesses that can establish distributed value creation networks. In an attempt to enable and facilitate envisioning such alternatives, this paper presents a novel conceptualisation of stakeholders and framing of their ever-shifting roles and responsibilities in complex value creation networks suggested by distributed production through a systematic literature review of 131 journal articles at the intersection of open design, distributed production and business models. The analysis revealed two main categories of stakeholders namely value-creation-for-self and value-creation-for-others, with a total of six sub-categories presenting varying capacities to participate in networked value creation processes. The article concludes with a discussion on how this conceptualisation can enable envisioning novel, open design-led business models in terms of collaborative value creation, managing distributed value networks and a layered approach to design and value offerings.