Value co-creation’s core interactive and value-creating nature is unified across theoretical perspectives.
Authors
Victor Saha, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Business School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Linda D. Hollebeek, Sunway Business School, Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania; Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia; Umea University, Umea, Sweden; University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
Mani Venkatesh, Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Praveen Goyal, Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Pilani, India
Moira Clark, Henley Business School, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom
Summary
Purpose: Value co-creation (VCC) represents actors’ joint, communal or shared value-creating processes. However, while existing research has advanced important VCC-based insight, the use of differing metatheoretical lenses to study VCC incurs a risk of theoretical fragmentation, thus potentially hampering this research stream’s continued development. We, therefore, undertake an in-depth review of the corpus of VCC research that focuses on its common conceptual underpinnings as anchored in differing perspectives.
Design/methodology/approach: To explore this objective, we undertake an extensive review of extant VCC literature, based on which we develop an integrative conceptual framework of VCC.
Findings: We propose an integrative, metatheory-unifying definition and framework of VCC that reflect its core hallmarks and dynamics across its adopted theoretical perspectives. Based on the framework, we also derive a set of fundamental propositions (FPs) that synthesize VCC’s core tenets.
Research limitations/implications: VCC conceptualizations grounded in differing metatheoretical perspectives reveal the concept’s core interactive, value-creating nature across metatheoretical perspectives. Though VCC emanates from interactivity between any actor constellation, unifying different metatheories of VCC uncovers important insight.
Practical implications: The study suggests that for effective value co-creation, managers need to establish agreed-upon institutional arrangements, facilitate positive actor relationships and experiences and address challenges like collaboration, transparency, empathy and skill development while ensuring that affective, cognitive, economic and social dimensions of success are met for all actors involved. Successful initiatives require seamless communication, mutual understanding, cost-benefit favorability and public recognition of contributions.
Originality/value: Given VCC’s rising strategic importance, a plethora of studies have investigated this concept from differing metatheoretical perspectives, yielding potential VCC-based fragmentation. Addressing this gap, we take stock of the VCC literature with a view to distilling the concept’s core, trans-metatheoretical hallmarks, as synthesized in the proposed framework and FPs of VCC.
Published in: Marketing Intelligence and Planning
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