Port Competitiveness and Supply Chain Management: the customer's value creation

Even though literature on port competitiveness is continuously evolving with reference to theoretical frameworks and approaches of analysis, the concept of value still remains blurred. In particular, while the concept of port value has been broadly addressed from the macro-economic perspective - through the analysis of the economic, social and recently environmental impacts of the port activities on the territory - from the micro-economic perspective, its boundaries are still debated. By adopting the micro-economic perspective of customer's value creation, the paper aims at: (1) analysing how port literature has addressed the concept of value and value creation from an organizational and managerial perspective; (2) addressing the shortcomings of the dominant models of analysis of port value creation; (3) proposing an alternative framework for the analysis of port value creation according to Resource Based View of the firm. The paper is structured as follows: the first section focuses on the analysis of the concept of value within the Supply Chain Management (SCM) research stream, addressing the industrial organization and the resource based view of the firm. In the second section, an extensive literature review on port competitiveness and SCM has been carried out aimed at highlighting main gaps of literature. The third section proposes a new framework for the analysis of port value creation process; in particular, value creation depends on port actors' interactions and resources allocation for satisfying customers' needs. As the paper is of theoretical nature, further research directions and conclusions are provided in the last sections.