Adopting a value co-creation perspective to understand High Street regeneration

The ‘High Street’ has traditionally played a key role in the health of towns worldwide. It is instrumental as a community hub, supporting local independent retail businesses and incubating entrepreneurship and innovation. Since 2009, thousands of stores have closed with record levels of shop vacancies. Reasons for the decline include a failure to respond to multi-channel retailing, wider demographic and economic changes and problems co-ordinating the network of actors who hold competing ideas about High Street regeneration. This paper evaluates the contribution of a value co-creation perspective in exploring strategy making in a complex retail high street ecosystem. It draws on Service-Dominant Logic and its service ecosystems perspective, institutional theory and data from a depth case study of strategy development in a UK High Street. The study illustrates how the value co-creation perspective, underpinned by institutional theory offers a rich appreciation of how actors in the ecosystem participate in shaping strategy. It identifies seven norms shared by the multiple actors, which serve as a point of reference for more sustainable strategy development. The normative analysis highlights the potential of operant resources amongst actors to shape strategy implementation. The study provides empirical evidence to support the role of institutions and institutional arrangements in effective value co-creation.