The Willingness of a Customer to Co-Create Innovative, Technology-Based Services: Conceptualisation and Measurement

Abstract

Customer co-creation is a phenomenon, whose relevance for innovative technology-based services (TBS) has been acknowledged both by scientific and management practice. However, empirical research on this topic is scarce. Above all others, the lack of a good metric for this construct to establish a common ground for empirical research has hampered progress to date. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a construct measuring the willingness of a customer to engage in co-creation (hereafer, WCC) of innovative, TBS. This article provides a thorough literature review on customer co-creation, proposes a scale to measure the willingness to co-create (WCC) innovative, TBS and reports the results of a validation process using expert judges, an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The results of our studies show that the scale has good psychometric properties and that its relationships with other constructs and consumer adoption behaviour conform to theoretical expectations.

Atypical Shifts Post-failure: Influence of Co-creation on Attribution and Future Motivation to Co-create

“…Co-creation has also been defined as the mutual and compensatory expenditure of resources and effort by co-creators (Arnould, Price, and Malshe 2006;Heidenreich et al 2015;McColl-Kennedy et al 2012). In a literature review of co-creation behavior, Handrich and Heidenreich (2013) found that 65% of the studies used customer effort as the major descriptor of customer co-creation, while the remainder used personalization. We incorporate this diversity in the understanding of co-creation in our empirical processes of measuring the construct of co-creation as interaction, personalization, and the exchange of effort and skills.…”

“…Empirical studies have characterized co-creation in terms of the time and effort that customers expend (Handrich and Heidenreich 2013). As a result, when customers contribute resources such as knowledge, skills, time, and effort to co-creating (Bendapudi and Leone 2003;Vargo and Lusch 2008), these resources become additional anchors for their attributions of failure.…”

Customer Integration in Mass Customisation: A Key to Corporate Success

“…This interaction establishes an interrelationship between provider and customer, which holds great potential for creating options in the after sales phase and thus, creating CL as well. The possibility of modifying certain features of services and products explicitly for individual consumers' preferences, especially generates a competitive advantage by increasing the customer's benefits, which the custom service has over the next best alternative (standard product) (Reichwald and Piller, 2009;Handrich and Heidenreich, 2013).…”

“…One measure for organising customer-friendly processes is standardisationthe proper extent being what matters: The challenge is to find the golden mean between the structuring of processes and the rigidity of processes; mass customisers should be able to respond to customers' diverse demands with sufficient flexibility. Although, standardised processes make the production of services easier for customers and facilitate smooth customer integration, excessive standardisation inhibits customers' passion for innovation and creativity (Öberg, 2010;Handrich and Heidenreich, 2013).…”

Service Providers’ Willingness to Change as Innovation Inductor in Services: Validating a Scale

“…More than that, current literature on service innovation admits the client to act as a co-creator of value (Grönroos, 2011) whose readiness, technologization and connectivity affect the experience for service development (Verleye, 2015). While some works focus on explaining how clients act during service delivery to co-create innovation with service providers through measuring the customers' willingness to co-create (such as Handrich & Heidenreich, 2013;Heidenreich & Handrich, 2015), on this paper, we focus on the role played by the actors in charge of dealing with clients' inputs for innovation on service development. In this sense, we believe that the service provider also plays an active role as vector for innovation in mobilizing his personal and organizational skills to transform the prior customer's reality (Gadrey, 2000).…”