Customer-Centered Antecedents of a Value Co-Creation Ecosystem: Integrating Psychological, Social, and Cultural Processes

Introduction

The concept of “Value co-creation” (VCC) rooted in service-dominant logic has gained wider acceptance by the research community across multiple academic disciplines during the last decade (Ramaswamy, & Ozcan, 2018). C.K Prahlad & Venkat Ramaswamy proposed the idea of value co-creation as joint creation of value by the company and the customer (Prahalad, & Ramaswamy, 2004).The idea had shown an initial inclination towards business economics which had a latent assumption of involving customers to take part in co-producing firm’s offerings that subsequently tend to reduce the cost of production. Later, Vargo & Lusch (2004) advanced the idea of value co-creation to resource based view and claimed that actors involved in co-creation integrate their operand (primarily tangible) and operant resources (like knowledge & skills) to create value for each-other. Resource integration has emerged as a key to co-creation which soon attracted attention of researchers to the extent that led to a more precise and comprehensive definition of value co-creation as McColl-Kennedy et al. (2012) proposed ''VCC could be understood as the benefit realized from integration of resources through activities and interactions with collaborators in the customer's service network''.Vargo and Lusch (2017) also aligned their views on value co-creation as an ongoing interplay of reciprocal exchange driven by creation and application of resources. Resource integration has largely been seen as the central activity as well as drivers of co-creation. Payne et al. (2008) closely examined the process of co-creation and explained three interconnected processes, namely, customer processes, supplier processes, and, encounter processes. Part of those processes are executed in the provider’s space, and the rest happens in the customer’s space and their extended service network that is primarily customer dependent (Grönroos, & Gummerus, 2014). The resources and practices generated during customer and supplier processes interact in the encounter process, and thereby generate value.

Context of co-creation have been given more importance gradually and the researchers started looking at co-creation at a much broader levels, and their unit of analysis has shifted from dyadic interactions of customer and provider, to numerous multilevel interactions happening across multiple stakeholders (including suppliers, employees, customers, extended customer network, policy makers, citizen, etc.) of the ecosystem (Fyrberg Yngfalk, 2013; Alves, et al., 2016; Vargo & Lusch, 2017). There has been a growing concern of researchers to adopt an ecosystem view of value co-creation to identify the contextual factors that have substantial bearings on co-creation experiences. Prior studies are yet to identify such factors which have multi-level influences across different stakeholders focusing a co-creation ecosystem. The ecosystem trends in value co-creation in businesses are studied from three different perspectives, first, strategy perspective, where value is instrumental; second, service marketing perspective, where value is phenomenological; and third, information systems perspective, where value is functional in nature (Autio, & Thomas, 2020). From a practical standpoint, when the firm understand their customer's co-creation pre-requisites (especially at social & cultural level), then they could re-design their co-creation strategy in such a way that they may target not just the customers but also the broader interconnected network of customer's service ecosystem to create a better service experience. The ideas co-created by both customers and employees are found to result into increased performance by organizations (Taghizadeh, et al., 2019). Broadening the perspective may also help organizations to offer better value propositions and gain competitive advantage, thereby realizing the true business potential of value co-creation (Saarijärvi et al., 2013). Autio et al. (2016) further explained the different mechanism by which ecosystem context can enhance the co-creation potential of customer-provider dyad within the service ecosystem. An ecosystem view of value co-creation helps in creating integrated value offering (Betz & Jung, 2021).