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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.