Most organisations believe they have a revenue problem. They don’t. They have a value capture gap.
Somewhere between what they create and what they are able—or willing—to claim in return, value leaks. It leaks through hesitation. Through underpricing. Through inherited assumptions about what feels ‘fair’. Through the quiet belief that usefulness will eventually justify reward. It rarely does.
The value capture gap is not a line item on a balance sheet. It is the structural distance between benefit delivered and value retained. And in far more organisations than we care to admit—from start-ups to cities, from consultancies to cultural institutions—that gap is widening.
We have been trained to celebrate creation. Build something meaningful. Solve a real problem. Improve lives. Make an impact. Only later, once legitimacy is secured, do we talk about earning.
The instinct sounds noble. It is often fatal.
Because value capture does not wait patiently at the end of the journey. It forms from the first interaction. Expectations settle early. If something begins free, free becomes the reference point. If terms are introduced tentatively, tentativeness becomes embedded in the relationship. If sacrifice is absorbed silently—by founders, teams, public budgets—that sacrifice becomes invisible, and therefore assumed. By the time organisations ask, How should we capture value?, the system has already learnt how to behave.
This is the gap. It is not simply a pricing mistake. It is a design failure. A failure to recognise that how you capture value shapes the system just as much as how you create it.
Value can’t wait
Founders often tell themselves a comforting story: claiming value can wait because mission matters more. Charging too early will corrupt the purity of the idea. Money will distort incentives. It will change the relationship. They are right about one thing. Claiming value does change the relationship.
But so does avoiding it.
When you postpone decisions about value capture, you do not preserve neutrality. You train the market. You teach customers what to expect. You normalise who carries risk and who does not. You embed an implicit answer to the question: who benefits when this scales?
In many cases, the value capture gap appears generous at first. Users benefit enormously. The organisation claims little. Growth is subsidised by optimism, external funding, or personal stamina. Everyone applauds the impact. Then comes the reckoning. Terms shift. Access narrows. Expectations are reset. And what once felt aligned begins to feel extractive. This is not because founders suddenly became greedy. It is because the gap was never consciously designed. It was deferred.
I see the same pattern beyond start-ups. Cities invest in infrastructure that increases property values—only to discover that the uplift is captured privately while public budgets strain. Creative industries build platforms for distribution—only to find intermediaries capturing disproportionate benefit. Professionals build reputations on generous thought leadership—only to realise that visibility without capture erodes viability.
In each case, value is created. In each case, the gap between creation and capture quietly expands. And when correction finally arrives, it feels abrupt, even unfair. The real problem is not monetisation. It is a misunderstanding. Value creation and value capture are not stages in a pipeline. They are parallel design decisions. Creating a benefit does not automatically entitle you to claim it. And claiming value does not prove you created it.
Capture what you create
The diagnostic question is sharper: does the way you capture value reflect the benefit experienced by those you serve? And is that claim intelligible—and defensible—to the people living inside your system?
To treat value capture as a technical afterthought is to misread the terrain. It is a leadership decision. It determines who carries risk, who enjoys upside, and whether trust compounds or corrodes. If there is a provocation here, it is this: stop congratulating yourself for creating value if you cannot explain how you capture it — and why that claim is justified. The gap you refuse to name will eventually name you.
Capture what you create. Not as an act of entitlement, but as an act of design. Because when value creation and value capture drift apart, alignment thins, legitimacy erodes, and correction rarely arrives gently. Value creation earns applause. Value capture earns legitimacy. Confuse the two, and you will lose both.
Capture What You Create
Photo: Dreamstime.
