Examining the Relationship Between Value Propositions and Scaling Value for New Companies

Abstract

To scale company value rapidly, a new company needs to develop value propositions for diverse parties – customers, investors, partners, suppliers, employees, and other resource owners, as well as align these value propositions with its scaling objectives. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between value propositions for a diverse set of parties, and efforts from a new company to scale company value rapidly. We review the value proposition literature and then examine the relationships between 19 assertions about value propositions, as well as six stable topics that best describe the SERS corpus, which is comprised of 137 assertions about scaling companies early, rapidly, and securely. Conducting a topic model of eight topics led to six stable topics: Fundraise, Enable, Position, Communicate, Innovate, and Complement. We find that of the 19 assertions about value propositions, four are connected to Complement, four to Innovate, one to Position, one to Fundraise, and one to Communicate. A total of eight assertions about value propositions are not connected to any of the six stable topics. This paper contributes to our understanding of how a new company scales company value rapidly, adding an application of topic modelling to perform small-scale data analysis.  The findings are expected to be relevant to entrepreneurs and new companies worldwide.

Keywords

• scaling company value
• scaling objectives
• topic modeling
• topic stability
• value proposition