Value Net Model
The Value Net Model maps the four players around any business, customers, suppliers, competitors, and complementors, so you can see who actually adds value to your position and who's quietly taking it away.
Four circles sit around a hub named Your Company, one for each player in the game.
Reach for this when…
- You're only tracking competitors and missing who else shapes the game.
- A partnership decision keeps getting framed as us versus them when it might be both.
- Growth has stalled and the obvious levers, price, marketing, aren't moving it.
How to run it
- Put your business at the centre.
- Map your customers and suppliers on the two vertical points.
- Map your competitors: businesses that make your offer less valuable to a customer.
- Map your complementors: businesses that make your offer more valuable to a customer.
- Look for moves that grow the whole pie, not just your slice: a complementor to court, a competitor to co-opt.
A worked example
Situation. Yossi Cohen ran HaGova Brewing, a craft brewery in Tel Aviv, Israel, focused entirely on competing against the other local breweries for tap space.
Applied. Mapping his value net, he noticed the food trucks and small venues near his taproom weren't competitors at all, they were complementors whose success drove people to his beer, and he'd never treated them as partners.
Result. He set up a revenue-share deal with three food trucks to park outside on brewery nights. Taproom foot traffic on those nights roughly doubled.
The catch
The model treats competitors and complementors as fixed roles, but the same business can be both depending on the deal, which the diagram doesn't capture well. It's a lens for spotting a missed relationship, not a tool for pricing or negotiation.
A business you've filed under 'competitor' out of habit might be the complementor you haven't tried yet.
Origin: Adam Brandenburger & Barry Nalebuff