Putting value co-creation into practice: a case for advisory support

The concept of value co-creation and its notion of the customer as co-creator of value have gained much academic interest, notably in marketing and operations research. While several competing perspectives have been conceptually discussed in literature, research on the practical implications of value co-creation is scarce. Using the example of sales-oriented advisory, we show gaps between existing co-creation concepts and current practice in five problem areas. We develop four general solution perspectives on the advisor-client encounter as guidelines to overcome these gaps and discuss design requirements of their technological instantiations in advisory support systems. We present exemplary implementations of such systems in two domains: travel counseling and financial advisory. Revealing the practical implications of value co-creation on advisory encounters, these examples also demonstrate that the solution perspectives have to be implemented quite differently for individual domains.

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