Potential Dimensions of Customer Co–Creation

Customer co-creation—the active involvement of customers in a firm’s new product development (NPD) processes—has been shown to improve product quality, reduce the risk of a product failing (Shah 2006; Carbonell, Rodriguez-Escudero and Pujari 2009), and, ultimately, enable firms to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004). To date, the open innovation literature (Chesbrough 2003; Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West 2006) has largely adopted a universalistic perspective of co-creation, whereby customer co-creation is treated as an one-dimensional, undifferentiated concept. In a first step towards a more differentiated perspective, the study reported in this paper examines whether dimensions exist that are fundamental (i.e., core) to customer co-creation practice. If such dimensions exist, then it would be possible to explore in follow-up studies whether different co-creation archetypes can be identified by observing if there are any systematic variations in the manifestations of the dimensions in co-creation practice.