Is it possible for companies and the users of their products to form mutually beneficial relationships that create value? The concept of value co-creation attempts to answer that question and it is the editorial theme of the November and December issues of the OSBR.

Check the Table of Contents here.

Excerpt from the editor’s summary introduction:

“Value co-creation examines the practices customers and companies use to co-create value. These practices affect the specification, design, production and manufacturing, distribution and support of the companies’ products and services. Co-creation enables a company to better satisfy customers’ demands for personalized products, services and experiences. The term value co-creation is broadly used and needs to be further clarified. This clarification is a challenging task and needs the cooperation of both business scholars and practitioners.

Value co-creation is an emerging concept and the body of literature associated with it is growing, but scarce. The growing interest in co-creation signals the emergence of a new semantic wave in management, marketing and innovation research. This perception makes the ongoing discussions an easy target for premature theoretical explorations leading to uncertainty and, sometimes, confusion. There is also an unconscious temptation to deal with the lack of contextual clarity by re-dressing well known concepts and paradigms and by mechanically refurbishing existing frameworks. Such approaches do not help in clearly identifying the need for a new terminology, new frameworks and new fields of research exploration. Due to the importance of co-creation and the large number of articles we received, we have dedicated two issues to this topic: November and December, 2009.

Kim op den Kamp from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands summarizes the results of the first study of business models involving corporate-driven co-creation communities. Four major benefits of online communities are identified: i) new product ideas; ii) customer communications; iii) customer feedback on ideas and applications; and iv) new knowledge.

Stephen Allen et al. provide the first quantitative study of the components of value co-creation. Their research identifies four co-creation components: i) learning from dialog; ii) resource sharing; iii) personalization; and iv) co-production.

Aron Darmody from the Schulich School of Business at York University illustrates how users’ creativity can be harnessed.

Tore Kristensen examines various aspects of the motivational and transformational processes in personal co-creation experiences. He explores the nature of the personal transformations taking place among ordinary people as consumers and users of cultural institutions.

Anna Kirah from CPH Design in Copenhagen argues that customer activism, experimentation, connectivity and knowledge enables people to become active participants in the value creation process. “