Unlabeled or double-headed arrows are meaningless. Diagrammed this way, however, we know exactly who initiates the exchange, what specific value or product is being conveyed and who receives it. With this level of detail we can analyze value creation from multiple perspectives such as time, goals, resources, results, costs or value added by linking the diagram to analysis tables. Note also that the originators and recipients are real people or groups of people. In the rush to understand the wild and wooly world of e-commerce, people often confuse the mechanism with the exchange.
New technologies are only pipelines for knowledge and value exchange.
The exchange is what is really important. This example shows a straightforward exchange of goods and services for revenue, knowledge exchanged for knowledge, and an intangible exchanged for an intangible. We can exchange knowledge for money in the form of a knowledge product or service, we can exchange knowledge for knowledge , and we can exchange knowledge for an intangible. An example of exchanging knowledge for an intangible would be when Sun Microsystems gave away its Java technology in hope of generating a web of loyal users, thus exchanging knowledge for loyalty. Unfortunately for the Java alliance, the dynamics of this were only partially understood, and the returns were not fully realized.