Value co-creation: concept and measurement

Abstract

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.

Innovation Ecosystems vs. Innovation Systems in Terms of Collaboration and Co-creation of Value

“…Initially elaborated by the business and market literature, this concept started to gain momentum in the post-2000 period, expanding further in its two dimensions, as both the idea of value co-production and the idea of value-in-use [25].…”

Creating a shared narrative: the use of causal layered analysis to explore value co-creation in a novel service ecosystem

“…In order to systematically relate and combine activities and resources with one another-and thus embrace different forms of collaboration-more focus should be placed on both the individual's and the organisation's abilities to reorient and reframe their thinking around systems, networks and ecosystems [27,45]. However, when analysing recent literature reviews on the theory of value co-creation, it seems that the current knowledge and understanding about co-creation is surprisingly incoherent and mainly consists of studies on customer experience [19,20]. Besides understanding the system-level coexistence of structural changes and stability, it is extremely important to recognise the huge differences in how the functioning and the evolution of service ecosystems are being conceptualised, especially depending on the logic being applied.…”

“…By contrast, the S-D logic view on value creation builds on a socially constructed multi-actor process that occurs at the intersection of activities among providers, consumers or any other possible actors, all of whom are participating in the value co-creation process [18,19,32]. In doing so, S-D logic conceptualises value co-creation as something that encompasses many disciplines and perspectives [48][49][50] and refers to service as the fundamental basis for value co-creation, i.e.…”

“…Besides the more theoretical discussion of value, increasingly dominated by the networked [13][14][15] and systemic conceptualisation of value creation [16][17][18], more empirical research is needed to validate the so far developed models and concepts of multi-actor value co-creation in real-life business environments [19,20]. Except studies focused on organisational learning [21][22][23] and employee motivation [23] in a variety of socially connected, both internal and external networks [24], little is known about the ways to develop and manage multidimensional networks of actors when loosely coupled in both formalised and nonformalised interactions [25].…”

The Importance of “Contextualisation” in Small and Medium-Sized Firms Valuation: Evidences from an Italian Case Study

“…More specifically, the centre of the process of value creation is determined in the interaction between company and customer and moreover is a value co-creation (Ranjan & Read, 2016). The customer has an active role with the company (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004) through the direct or indirect cooperation in one or more phases of production or consumption (Payne, Storbacka & Frow, 2008;Payne, Storbacka, Frow, & Knox, 2009;Hoyer, Chandy, Dorotic, Krafft, & Singh, 2010;Roggeveen, Tsiros, & Grewal, 2012).…”