Reframing Value Creation Around Intent, Circulation, and Regeneration
Executive Summary — From Value Chains to Value Cycles
Traditional business models like Porter’s Value Chain frame value creation as a linear, input-to-output process focused primarily on efficiency and profit extraction. However, this linear approach overlooks fundamental system dynamics: who initiates value creation, why they act, what makes them act the way they do, and how value actually circulates and evolves across stakeholders and ecosystems.
Value Cycles offer a more accurate, equitable, and adaptive alternative. In this model:
- Value Flows represent existing surpluses in the ecosystem — financial, relational, cognitive, cultural, and systemic — ready to be tapped and transformed.
- Value Activation is the entry point: the moment a Value Actor intentionally engages with value flows, motivated by insight, need, or opportunity. This activation sets the regenerative cycle in motion.
- Their engagement is influenced by Value Attractors — forces such as profit expectations, growth pressures, trust, legitimacy, and purpose — which shape behavior toward extractive or regenerative pathways.
Innovation is reframed as the transformation of value into new, enriched forms — with two possible pathways:
- Extractive: capturing value while depleting flows,
- Regenerative: enriching flows and strengthening systemic resilience.
A Value Cycle consists of the following sequence:
Value Flows → Value Activation → Value Transformation → Value Circulation → Value Returns (enriching flows)
Returns — profit, insight, trust, and learning — are not the goal but signals that regeneration is occurring, feeding into subsequent activations.
Unlike linear chains, regenerative cycles leave ecosystems healthier than they were before engagement. Profit and other returns emerge as consequences of meaningful contribution, aligning long-term viability with systemic resilience, stakeholder wellbeing, and continuous innovation.
