Mapping Value Co-creation Literature in the Technology and Innovation Management Field: A Bibliographic Coupling Analysis

Abstract

Value co-creation has become a very important topic in several disciplines. It is observed that value co-creation has been analyzed mainly from a perspective of marketing or services. The interest of studying value co-creation in relation to innovation is growing but there are no previous literature reviews that focus on the literature that studies value co-creation from a technology and innovation management perspective. The present research aims to close this gap. This research has two aims. First, we make a descriptive analysis of the evolution of documents published from 2004 to 2020. We analyze the main journals and identify the most prolific authors. In addition, we observe collaborative behavior at three different levels-country, institution, and author. Second, we determine the content structure of this literature through a bibliographic coupling analysis, and characterize the resulting groups. As a result of this analysis, we describe eleven thematic groups and characterize them through different metrics. Based on these metrics and the previous analysis, we classify and explain the studies about co-creation in the technology and innovation management field. We obtained three research streams: open innovation, consumer-centric analysis, and service ecosystem and service innovation, and two new trends: servitization and the sharing economy.

Integrated co-creation process with multiple stakeholders in innovation networks

“…There is a research vacuum (void) between open science, Innovation and co-creation (Ramirez & Penalvo, 2018;Najera-Sanchez et al, 2020). Huizingh (2011) argues that the context of open innovation is poorly understood, requiring research on the organizational characteristics of co-creation of the internal and external environment (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004b).…”

Analysis of front end dynamic in the value co-creation with multiple stakeholders

“…Nájera-Sanchez et al. (2020) made a bibliographic coupling analysis on co-creation and extended it to many stakeholders, pointing that the client can play several roles such as being a source of information, co-developer and innovator.…”

Re-discussion of servitization strategy and firm performance

“…In terms of driving factors, Baines et al (2020) investigated the process of organizational change generated by servitization to analyze the drivers of servitization. Nájera-Sánchez et al (2020) identified value co-creation as an important driving factor for firms to develop servitization via a bibliographic coupling analysis. In terms of future research directions, Khanra et al (2021) recommended actionable future research agendas on servitization by systematically analyzing the servitization literature.…”

“…In the Industry 4.0 era, the servitization of manufacturing is a new business model and production pattern ( Weking et al, 2020 ). In this context, more manufacturers are considering its servitization with a strategic change from manufacturing products simply to providing product service ( Nájera-Sánchez et al, 2020 ; Liu et al, 2022 ). Because the homogenization of tangible products is an inevitable trend, it is only to create a competitive advantage of differentiation among them through service innovation ( Baines et al, 2009 ).…”