Well, that really depends on what you define as value. There are plenty of tech companies out there that created tons of "valuable" code but were not successful because somebody else got the attention or was able to strike one critical deal.

As for allocating resources to networking before there is a working product, check out www.path101.com. I met these guys when they did an open brainstorming session with nothing but a preliminary pitch deck and not a line of code. Being open from very early on enabled them to find angel investors and their first employees, and when it came time to doing an alpha launch they had tons of people that had been eager to try the thing out for months.