A value shop is an organization designed to solve customer or client problems, rather than creating value by producing output from an input of raw materials.
The principles of value shops were first conceptualized by Thompson in 1967, and properly defined by Charles B. Stabell and Øystein D. Fjeldstad of the Norwegian School of Management in 1998, who also created the name.
Compared to Michael Porter's concept of the value chain, there is no sequential fixed set of activities or resources utilized to create value.
According to the research of Stabell and Fjeldstad, the value configuration analysis (1998), five main generic activities are carried out in the organization: Value is created in the shop by several mechanisms allowing the organization to solve problems better or faster than the client.
The value shop concept has also been applied to a number of other activities including Norwegian police investigations (e.g. Gottschalk, 2007) and the knowledge-intensive energy exploration business (Woiceshyn and Falkenberg, 2008).