The surge in academic and practical interest in the topic of value co-creation (VCC) highlights an equivocal understanding of its conceptual boundaries and empirical constituents. Our search of the diverse scholarly literature on VCC identified 149 papers, from which we extract the two primary conceptual VCC dimensions of co-production and value-in-use. Though the combination of these two distinct dimensions is theoretically necessary to describe VCC, 79% of the studies in our dataset consider only one or the other. Such underlying theoretical ambiguity may explain conflicting results in earlier studies and motivates our effort to offer four contributions to the literature. First, we conduct a rigorous review, integrating existing work to expose the theoretical core of VCC. Second, we utilize the results from our review to isolate the two main theoretical dimensions of VCC and expose the three conceptual elements which underlie each dimension. Third, we apply our theoretical findings to derive empirical measurement constructs for each dimension. Fourth, we refine, analyze, and test the resulting measurement index in an investigation into consumer satisfaction.

Two prescriptions dominate the topic of what firms should do next in uncertain situations: planning approaches and adaptive approaches. These differ primarily on the appropriate role of prediction in the decision process. Prediction is a central issue in strategy making owing to the presumption that what can be predicted can be controlled. In this paper we argue for the independence of prediction and control. This implies that the pursuit of successful outcomes can occur through control‐oriented approaches that may essentially be non‐predictive. We further develop and highlight control‐oriented approaches with particular emphasis on the question of what organizations should do next. We also explore how these approaches may impact the costs and risks of firm strategies as well as the firm's continual efforts to innovate. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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How do people approach marketing in the face of uncertainty, when the product, the market, and the traditional details involved in market research are unknowable ex ante? The authors use protocol analysis to evaluate how 27 expert entrepreneurs approach such a problem compared with 37 managers with little entrepreneurial expertise (all 64 participants are asked to think aloud as they make marketing decisions in exactly the same unpredictable situation). The hypotheses are drawn from literature in cognitive science on (1) expertise in general and (2) entrepreneurial expertise in particular. The results show significant differences in heuristics used by the two groups. While those without entrepreneurial expertise rely primarily on predictive techniques, expert entrepreneurs tend to invert these. In particular, they use an effectual or nonpredictive logic to tackle uncertain market elements and to coconstruct novel markets with committed stakeholders.

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