Tanev Stoyan et al., « How do value co-creation activities relate to the perception of firms' innovativeness? » ,

In the dynamic environment of increasing customer expectations and fierce price competition it is hard for health service providers to keep constant service quality, not to mention improve it, considering the increasing cost of labour and services, while sustaining the customer relationship. On the other hand, with the emergence of mobile devices, cloud-based services and big data, new capabilities arise for transforming health services towards cost reduction, individualization, and even gaining a competitive advantage. This paradigm motivates a number of business-to-customer (B2C) service-level innovations in the health industry based on information and communication technologies (ICT). In this work, we present the results of a study we conducted among 522 gym members in Germany. The goal of the survey was to identify market opportunities for service-level improvements and validate them among gym members empirically. During the standard innovation process, we identified video streaming of trainings as a potential solution. We could furthermore prove a positive relationship between the participation of group fitness classes and customer satisfaction, as well as significant interest in technology-based innovation in the fitness industry.

Value co-creation, is an emerging business and innovation paradigm, however, there is not enough clarity on the distinctive characteristics of value co-creation as compared to more traditional value creation approaches. The present paper summarizes the results from an empirically-derived research study focusing on the development of a systematic procedure for the identification of firms that are active in value co-creation. The study is based on a sample 273 firms that were selected for being representative of the breadth of their value co-creation activities. The results include: i) the identification of the key components of value co-creation based on a research methodology using web search and Principal Component Analysis techniques, and ii) the comparison of two different classification techniques identifying the firms with the highest degree of involvement in value co-creation practices. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study using sophisticated data collection techniques to provide a classification of firms according to the degree of their involvement in value co-creation.

No abstract

No abstract