Digital transformation in the sources of value creation: an analysis in the cultural industries

In this paper we show the changing patterns in the mechanisms of value creation in cultural and creative industries before and after the digitization process. Through an in-depth case study of a leading cultural institution – the Van Gogh Museum – we identify three main key shifts in the value creation mechanisms from the pre-digital to the post-digital world. First, in the digital world customer value is created mostly by intangibles. Second, the intensity of the value creation is higher in the digital world for each dimension of the value chain. Third, our analyses show that physical resources matter also in digital settings and that they act as “anchor” and “bottlenecks” to customer value creation.