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Involving users in new product design and development is in itself not a new phenomenon. Academic research on the subject, however, is relatively new. Since this new millennium research on user involvement in innovations has multiplied, exhibiting that firms who actively involve users in their innovation process can benefit from this initiative, even though literature also warns us for relying too much and too actively on the participation of customers in innovation. However, research is mainly descriptive and explanatory of nature, and is seldom a prescription for firm managers on what to do should they decide to involve their customers in an innovation initiative.

This paper addresses this omission in literature and tries to give some first building blocks for a protocol for firms that want to involve their customers in innovations. This protocol will be the result of the author's further research on literature, previously executed projects by the author, expert interviews and a design and development process, in continuation of this paper.

The research addressed within this paper sets out to develop a framework towards facilitating health-related technology transfer (TT) to and within sub-Saharan African countries. In turn, this framework will attempt to alleviate healthcare burdens in developing nations through a combination of acquisitions and collaborative technology development. Systematic conceptual and comparative literature reviews have been conducted to identify the major characteristics of TT. The conceptual review has outlined the universal characteristics of TT such as TT methods, prominent stakeholders and the importance of knowledge transfer while the systematic comparative review exclusively evaluated sub-Saharan African healthcare TT characteristics such as infrastructure barriers and the marketability of the transfer object. The outcomes of the literature reviews have been clustered into five phases, forming the basis of the conceptual framework. This framework aims to guide a user through the phases of technology development, technology analysis, technology transfer method application, change management and commercialization by providing managerial best practices at each phase. The conceptual framework has been evaluated by incorporating the outcomes of 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with healthcare and TT industry experts. The final framework aims to provide guidelines for any stakeholder involved in healthcare technology transfer regardless of the healthcare implementation by highlighting best practices surrounding stakeholder co-creation, transfer method application and constructing a sustainable healthcare technology transfer venture.

Increasing digitalization and new technological possibilities also entail substantial changes for working methods in the B2B (business-to-business) environment in banking. In this context, the concept of co-creation is critical. Although this concept and the motivation factors behind it have been thoroughly investigated in the B2C (business-to-consumer) sector, only a few research results exist for the B2B context. This study aims to bridge the current knowledge gap and investigate individuals’ motivation to participate in B2B co-creation. By using a case study and qualitative interviews, this study focuses on two aspects: (a) It reveals how a co-creation measure is used in practice in the B2B environment; and (b) it provides information on the motivation factors and outcome from the point of view of the participants in the B2B co-creation project. The paper concludes with an integrative model of the main motivation factors behind B2B co-creation and their effects.

Although innovation laboratories offer creative and distinct physical spaces for mediating and directing innovation processes, research on their applicability for co-creative learning during serious play, particularly through Lego Serious Play (LSP) workshops remains limited. Previous studies suggest that serious play workshops tend to focus on scenarios, problem solving and reflective processes, with limited considerations for joint co-creation and learning potentials within innovation laboratories. Motivated by the creative prospects of metaphoric representations and shared stories, this study explores the possibilities of harnessing LSP for co-creative learning in innovation laboratories. This case study draws theoretical insights and practical relevance from a co-creative learning workshop involving three learning scenarios within a Middle Eastern and emerging economy context. Findings from the workshop show variability in representations, interactions and reflections, shaping possibilities for co-creative learning in innovation laboratories. Representations focus on systems, solutions and problems during fragmented, model-supported, model-mediated and integrated interactions that underpin a range of instance-based, variance-based, convergence-based and divergence-based reflections. These insights contribute to co-creation literature that views value creation as an amalgamation of open, collaborative and user innovation. The study concludes by discussing its theoretical implications, practical applications, and methodological limitations, which serve as the basis for future research directions.

Identifying shifts in the needs and behavior of social systems and markets depicts promising new market opportunities for creative organizations. Potential users might be adept in reflecting those shifts and irregularities in collaboration due to their outsider perspective. This paper is a systematic inquiry into the unique contribution of potential users and its embodiment in communication in co-creation activities. Following the principles of grounded theory, contributions and strategies of potential users are contrasted with those of current users within varying dyadic compositions. Tentative propositions pertaining to the merits and limitations of collaboration with potential users and with regard to emergences in varying dyadic compositions are derived. The resulting core category "enriched compensation and improvisation" shows that potential users' contributions unintentionally pervade the collaboration with social, cultural and emotional values, which can be regarded as problem finding as opposed to problem solving creativity. Their willingness to improvise leads to a series of ad-hoc changes to initial ideas which foster transformation when combined. Collaboration with potential users therefore depicts ways to leverage technological competences and shape promising new market opportunities.

Customer co-creation is a phenomenon, whose relevance for innovative technology-based services (TBS) has been acknowledged both by scientific and management practice. However, empirical research on this topic is scarce. Above all others, the lack of a good metric for this construct to establish a common ground for empirical research has hampered progress to date. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a construct measuring the willingness of a customer to engage in co-creation (hereafer, WCC) of innovative, TBS.

This article provides a thorough literature review on customer co-creation, proposes a scale to measure the willingness to co-create (WCC) innovative, TBS and reports the results of a validation process using expert judges, an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The results of our studies show that the scale has good psychometric properties and that its relationships with other constructs and consumer adoption behaviour conform to theoretical expectations.

Co-creation is a special type of collaboration that co-opts individuals in an innovative way for creating value. Engaging in co-creation can result in mutual benefit for the participants as they obtain favourable end results or exchange knowledge and skills but may be challenging when an individual may not be ready or willing to co-create. This makes it imperative that an individual's readiness to co-create (RTCC) is understood and factored into the management of co-creative processes. Drawing from research on readiness to collaborate, factors that determine RTCC are examined in this article. Specifically, the relationship between constructs of individual value system (IVS), organisational value system (OVS), contextual-environmental conditions (EC), intrapersonal characteristics (IntraCharac), interpersonal characteristics (InterCharac), and RTCC are examined. Post confirmatory factor analysis indicated that most of the variables of the six constructs had loaded on a particular factor except for IntraCharac that loaded only 2 variables. Based on these results, multiple regressions were performed, which indicated that environmental conditions and InterCharac did have significant influence on RTCC whereas IntraCharac did not have a strong effect. Managerial implications and potential future research directions are also highlighted.

Companies develop co-creation platforms to collect innovative ideas generated by consumers. The idea competition model is traditionally used to organise such collective action and has been widely implemented by companies. In parallel, the development of collaborative platforms and social networks have led to the appearance of co-creation platforms based on a cooperation model with community features. In addition to these two classical models, a third model, a combination of competition and cooperation — the coopetition model — has emerged. Although there is growing interest in this model, no study to date has compared its performance to the other two models. Our research objective is to investigate and compare how these three models affect creative performance in terms of idea quantity and quality. We thus conducted an experiment with 177 students to generate ideas that were submitted to an established company. The results show that the coopetition model generates more ideas and more creative ideas than the other two models. We also offer insights on how a consumer co-creation platform should be designed to achieve better creative performance.

This paper aims to provide a contemporary, critical and systematic overview of user-centric innovation (UCI) from a consumer perspective. The objectives of this paper were to identify and categorise gaps in research and/or knowledge, contextually classify empirical UCI studies, critically analyse the literature in terms of coalition/fragmentation and derive practitioner implications for industry implementation. Our findings indicate that user communities should be carefully evaluated by firm management as they can represent significant risks in relation to resource requirements as well as opportunities for capitalising on new product development. Furthermore, by ascertaining which product-related resources the consumers are lacking, it may provide organisations with details of the consumers’ ahead-of-the-market needs and may be used to devise effective recognition-based proactive UCI strategies. A research framework was also formulated to help future UCI researchers navigate the complex network of previous research and to assist in developing more structured and focussed future research questions.

Within firms, procedures would be the site of a big pool of business assets that always take into account the preponderance of the firm’s physical and human capital. In enterprises, innovation, marketing, and product design should be closely coordinated. Most research has demonstrated that an effective connection among innovation R&D, marketing activities, and design pushes products into the marketplace and guarantees their success. However, empirical studies of the Co-creations among innovation, marketing, and design strategies in new product development (NPD) performance are rare. This gives an effective empirical contribution towards the emerging body of students developing the co-creation paradigm, mainly indicated by conceptual advances in strategic management logic. The overall aim of the paper is to unravel the nature of strategy processes of co-creation in innovation.

In this study, enterprises from the Taiwan Bicycle Exporter’s Association (TBEA) database were chosen randomly as subjects. In the first survey, the status of the marketing strategy, innovation strategy, and design strategy was determined. After a new product was marketed for one year, a second survey was conducted as an NPD performance check. After repeated contact, 188 enterprises (23.5%) responded. Major findings of the study are as follows. (1) The structural equation model (SEM) results demonstrate a great fit between your theoretical model and observed data for innovation, marketing, and design methods. (2) The NPD performance is affected by an enterprise’s innovation, marketing, and design methods. Furthermore, innovation and marketing methods also influence NPD performance through design strategy. For NPD performance, design technique is both a completely independent variable as well as an intervening variable. (3) The NPD performance could be strengthened when businesses struggle for innovation, marketing, and design methods. Controlling the co-creation process is really a complex endeavor. The research findings claim that managers of co-produced service improvements develop an interactive procedure for inducing and imagining innovative actions of the network stars.

This paper assesses the effects of aligning co-creation partners’ communications on consumers’ perceptions of joint innovation efforts. Two online experiments are conducted. Study 1 ($n=201$) investigates message content alignment (partners stating identical versus complementary messages) and visual alignment (partners assimilating the visual design of their communications versus autonomous designs). Results reveal a positive effect of using complementary over identical message content on consumers’ perceptions of the co-created product. The latter effect is reinforced by autonomous visual designs. Study 2 ($n=137$) shows that the effect of content alignment on both the lead firm and co-creation partners are mediated by the perceived fit between partners and the perceived corporate credibility of the lead firm. This research is one of the first to study effects of communication by multiple co-creation partners and demonstrates the positive effects of adequately aligning partners’ communications about joint innovation efforts.

This study aims to conceptualise the risks of a co-creation relationship between providers and customers in the front end of innovation (FEI). The existing literature on the topic of the interactions between customers and providers is vast but mostly reflects the vision of each respective field of science addressing specific issues and dynamics. This review paper combines integrative and generative approaches (Post et al., 2020). The narrative overview methodology (Green et al., 2006) fits the purpose to integrate the contributions of scholars from different areas and with distinct perspectives. The authors present a comprehensive view of the complex and, sometimes, conflictual customer–provider relationship in a business-to-business (B2B) context applied to the FEI. The review, mostly focused in the service industry, included the identification of inconsistencies and poorly explained phenomena. This work contributes decisively to the innovation, management and organisation literature, advancing a model of the projected risks of the specific customer–provider relationship in the FEI phase.

Partnership with startups offers large firms knowledge about, and access to new technologies. Incumbents’ emphasis on corporate-startup collaboration has therefore reached a new level and various models for corporate-startup collaboration can now be found among large enterprises. “Co-creation” between large firms and technology startups, is one of these models that increases in traction. The model is, however, under-researched and research on frameworks and metrics for evaluating the business effects from corporate-startup co-creation is scarce. The purpose of this paper is therefore to extend the existing body of knowledge by investigating frameworks and metrics for evaluating corporate-startup “co-creation” and to suggest a framework for evaluation of corporate-startup co-creation programs. A literature review on identified frameworks and metrics is presented, covering research findings on evaluation models for corporate-startup collaboration. The main finding in this paper is a “multi-stakeholder framework” for evaluating the collaboration’s results in corporate-startup co-creation models.

User engagement in innovation processes is crucial for the development of sustainable healthcare. One promising user-centred approach used to integrate users’ experiential knowledge in the development of innovations is the Living Lab (LL). However, we lack a systematic understanding of the processes, methods and factors that lead to more effective user engagement. The objective of this scoping review is to map and systematically present current research on user engagement in Healthcare Living Labs (HLLs) to enhance understanding and inspire future research. Our review shows that the level of user engagement is still low given the limited use of methods tailored to support it and that HLL are predominantly used in technology and clinical innovation. We offer a clearer depiction and description of the methods innovation managers could use to foster greater user engagement in HLL.

Co-creation is recognised in the literature as fostering successful collaboration between academia and industry. Although models do exist, they only contain general principals and provide no details about the process from ideation to value creation. Moreover, they are established based on a consideration that industry submits a problem and the university provides solutions. However, with increasing pressure on researchers for their research to lead to tangible applications, universities must now also turn to firms to pinpoint their needs and practices. The purpose of this paper is to understand how a researcher can implement and manage a co-creation project in collaboration with firms to foster innovation. A university research team in food science and technology, in response to the issue of allergen management in the food service industry, more specifically the use of eggs in pastries, has led a co-creation project with six professional pastry chefs to improve cake formulations, in which eggs were replaced with legume puree. Based on the results and the literature, a model to manage the co-creation process between academia and industry that incorporates a collaboration platform is proposed. This paper also identifies the concrete practices that foster creativity and interaction among participants and that lead to innovation.

Innovation studies have shown a growing interest in collaborative approaches, particularly user co-creation within innovation spaces. This qualitative study delves into the intricate dynamics of user involvement in fostering user-centric innovation within living labs. Through interviews with 22 informants across 14 countries from 2021 to 2022, this study presents a comprehensive framework outlining four pivotal phases of involvement: recruitment, motivation, co-creation, and relation. Through a nuanced exploration of the critical factors shaping each, the research illuminates ongoing debates and consensus surrounding the orchestration of the co-creation process and the vital role of living labs in cultivating innovations. By offering insights into the co-creation process with users, the study underscores the approaches adopted by living labs to achieve sustainable outcomes in user-centric innovation. These findings provide valuable knowledge that can aid practitioners in navigating challenges related to user engagement, thereby advancing user-centric innovation initiatives.

Co-creation, an active end-users involvement in product development process, has been recognized as an effective way of minimizing risk of misinterpretation of end-user needs and achieving product success. Furthermore, high level of co-creation has seemed to create high perceived value to products. With an aim of encouraging many more firms to involve their end-users in the product development process, a quantitative tool developed to help the firms evaluate their readiness and potential for co-creation is presented in this paper. Important characteristics for co-creation have been established from the literature and have been classified with the help of expert opinion into three different levels: must-have, should-have and nice-to-have. The firms that fulfill all the must-have characteristics are ready for co-creation, and their potential is evaluated from the should-have and nice-to-have characteristics. An exploratory case study on three shoe manufacturers was conducted for illustration.

In a conventional view, customers just purchase the goods or services created by companies. But the role of customers has changed. Now customers are seeking to practice their influence in every part of the business system as a co-creator. What is co-creation? Is it like customization? The answer is yes and no. The difference between co-creation and customization depends on the degree of involvement of the customer in the business. Generally, the customer plays a much more active role in co-creation than customization. Co-creation refers to almost every part of a business, but customization is restricted to the end stage of production. Co-creation can happen in the process of sales support, which can ultimately improve sales performance. This paper illustrates the relationships among co-creation, sales support and sales performance, and designs an experiment to test.

Companies develop co-creation platforms to collect innovative ideas generated by consumers. The idea competition model is traditionally used to organise such collective action and has been widely implemented by companies. In parallel, the development of collaborative platforms and social networks have led to the appearance of co-creation platforms based on a cooperation model with community features. In addition to these two classical models, a third model, a combination of competition and cooperation — the coopetition model — has emerged. Although there is growing interest in this model, no study to date has compared its performance to the other two models. Our research objective is to investigate and compare how these three models affect creative performance in terms of idea quantity and quality. We thus conducted an experiment with 177 students to generate ideas that were submitted to an established company. The results show that the coopetition model generates more ideas and more creative ideas than the other two models. We also offer insights on how a consumer co-creation platform should be designed to achieve better creative performance.

This paper aims to provide a contemporary, critical and systematic overview of user-centric innovation (UCI) from a consumer perspective. The objectives of this paper were to identify and categorise gaps in research and/or knowledge, contextually classify empirical UCI studies, critically analyse the literature in terms of coalition/fragmentation and derive practitioner implications for industry implementation. Our findings indicate that user communities should be carefully evaluated by firm management as they can represent significant risks in relation to resource requirements as well as opportunities for capitalising on new product development. Furthermore, by ascertaining which product-related resources the consumers are lacking, it may provide organisations with details of the consumers’ ahead-of-the-market needs and may be used to devise effective recognition-based proactive UCI strategies. A research framework was also formulated to help future UCI researchers navigate the complex network of previous research and to assist in developing more structured and focussed future research questions.