Value Co-Creation in Archival Resources: Exploring the Feature of National Archives of Bangladesh (NAB)'s Open Access Project

Value Co-Creation

The concept of value co-creation has been emerged in service discipline and getting attention to academics and practitioners as a predominant research concept in the past twenty years. Since then, a number of studies have been investigated on the concept from the perspective of customers’ relationship, co-production, co-creation, co-destruction, stakeholder interactions, and self-service. The main purpose of the concept is creating value as like as the central purpose of economic exchange (Vargo et al., 2004). In service organization, value is created with the joint endeavour of service provider and recipients in a service system. Therefore, value is co-created jointly in interaction among service providers and customers through the integration of resources and application of competencies (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). The fundamental elements of the co-creation process in the service system are interaction, involvement and skill and experiences. Thereby, value can be co-created when service provider and service recipient both entities actively involve and apply their skill and knowledge in the co-creation activity for the benefit of each other.

It is important to define value co-creation prior to deepening the concept. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) defined value creation as the process of service flow from the service provider to service recipient. In this perspective, the value is created by the firm (value in exchange) where the interaction between firm and customers are not seen. In the alternative approach of value creation, value is created jointly with the interaction of service provider and service recipient through the integration of resources and application of competencies (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). In this co-creation process, customer is always act as co-creator of value. In a recent study, McColl-Kennedy et al. (2012, p. 1) defined customer value co-creation from healthcare perspective as “benefit realized from integration of resources through activities and interactions with collaborators in the customer’s service network.” Therefore, value co-creation can be defined as an interactive process where two or more actors are involved and not only service provider but also customer can integrate resources to co-create value in the value co-creation process (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; McColl-Kennedy et al., 2012).