Objectifying Value Co-creation - An Exploratory Study

Understanding value co-creation has been identified has a critical research topic area due to the evolution on how customers design, produce and consume products/services. Moreover, there is a plethora of theory sources that address it and an apparent lack of alignment between them. In this exploratory study, we use enterprise engineering techniques, namely organizational modelling methodologies (DEMO and e3Value), to clarify the co-creation and co-design concepts. In order to do so, we extended the Flower Shop case with procedures that were identified in the literature as co-creation. The analysis of this case allowed us to objectify the co-design and co-production concepts by defining in which specific modelling patterns these concepts can be illustrated, in order to make them explicit and assert alignment with the business model. Furthermore, such analysis has supported specification of a generic co-creation (sub)organization which serves as a reference for alignment with service design and management knowledge areas.