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Purpose This paper aims to analyze the implications of communicating customer involvement in the ideation and concept stage of new product development (NPD). This paper assesses the extent to which the awareness that a product was co-created jointly by company professional designers and consumers affects observer consumers’ attitudes toward the product and the company. While earlier research has mainly emphasized the positive and desirable consequences of consumer participation in NPD, the present set of studies shows that labeling products as having been co-created is not always valuable; rather, it is dependent on the level of perceived complexity of the products. Design/methodology/approach The hypotheses are tested in four experimental studies using several categories of product complexity (low, medium and high). The data have been collected on young adult samples, measuring the participants’ perceptions of a firm’s innovation ability and product purchase intentions. Findings The results suggest that there are benefits at the corporate level (higher perceptions of innovation ability) to inform the market about consumer involvement, particularly when consumers and company professionals work together. The findings also indicate that product complexity plays a critical role in translating the perceptions of greater corporate abilities (innovation) in purchase intention, and it is particularly beneficial for low-complexity products. Originality/value The previous research has mainly focused on the impact of involving consumers in firms and participating consumers; however, it has neglected the role of observer consumers. This study adds to the innovation literature by showing that the value of learning about other consumers’ involvement in firm NPD is not universally beneficial and that product complexity is a critical boundary condition.

Love is a powerful human process that has attracted the attention of scholars within the cultural and scientific domains. Thus far, the majority of management scholars have tended to neglect love as a relevant topic of theorizing and research. Given the recent interest in the phenomenon in allied fields such as sociology and psychology, this is surprising. We create, inductively, an archetypical image of how managers make sense of the meaning of love as an organizational phenomenon by means of a sample of Christian managers. The findings indicate that such managers associate love with two core dimensions. First, they describe love as an expression of virtue. Second, they link love with a sense of community-ship. Organizational love can thus be theorized as the exercise of constructing virtuous, other-oriented human communities that transcend the productive functions of work and respond to important human needs, fulfilling normative performativity.