Transcending and bridging co-creation and engagement: conceptual and empirical insights

Abstract

Transcending and bridging co-creation and engagement: conceptual and empirical insights Co-creation is a transcending perspective of marketing, an umbrella term recognising the contemporary evaluation of value creation (Vargo and Lusch, 2016b;Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004).It requires bridging concepts such as engagement to bring relevance to inform marketing/market practices (Brodie, Saren and Pels, 2011).Through the development and exploration of mid-range theory that underpins co-creation, it enables a more prescriptive understanding reflective of business practice and conducive to empirical evaluation, which ultimately enables the meta-theoretic perspective to move forward (Vargo and Lusch, 2016b).Co-creation and engagement share common characteristics such as building on interactive experiences, iterative processes, and resultant mutual beneficial outcomes (Brodie, Hollebeek, Jurić and Ilić, 2011;Grönroos and Voima, 2013; Vargo and Lusch, 2016a).Hence, convergence of the two concepts is often seen in the previous literature (e.g.Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014).Continuing this trend, the scope of the special issue covers resource integration and interaction for value emergence (Chen et al., 2012).This special issue includes nine papers providing conceptual and empirical insights to inform practice in various conventional and contemporary contexts, such as education, social media, corporate social responsibility (CSR), online brand communities, and within the sharing economy.Our special issue extends the dialogue on who co-creates value with whom; further exploring the concepts of engagement and co-creation among a network of actors (Storbacka et al., 2016), their interaction (Grönroos, 2008;Heinonen et al., 2010), resource integration (Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2012), and the essence and mechanisms of engagement platforms (Breidbach et al., 2014;Ramaswamy and Ozcan, 2016).Spanning multiple levels from the individual, to multiple actors, and the service ecosystem, we present three conceptual papers that through their theorizing approaches demonstrate how multiple stakeholders affect and are affected by the (iterative) resource integration and interaction that occurs within the service ecosystem.The three conceptual papers complement the six empirical papers, which investigate various aspects of the nomological networks of co-creation and engagement within service ecosystems.The first of the conceptual papers is by Michael Kleinaltenkamp, Carolin Plewa, Siegfried Gudergan, Ingo Oswald Karpen and Tom Chen and is entitled "Usage centervalue cocreation in multi-actor usage processes".This paper conceptualises and delineates the notion of a usage center, recognising how individual focal actors share and access resources in interdependent usage processes with other actors to create individual and collective value.Taking the perspective of a focal actor, the authors offer a proposed

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