Co-creating services—conceptual clarification, forms and outcomes

1. Introduction

Organizations are increasingly adopting strategies to co-create with their customers: to improve the service experience, DHL hosts co-design workshops with customers; LEGO develops new offerings with lead users; and Netflix launched a competition to improve its services with its online community (Chesbrough, 2011; DHL Solutions & Innovations, 2017; Prpić et al., 2015). Co-creation is rooted in the verb create, which is defined as bringing something into existence, causing something to happen as a result of one’s actions, and in co-, which means together with another or others (Oxford Dictionaries, 2018). In service management, co-creation refers to the service process and the service product; service providers aim to co-create with customers and other actors to create distinctive services, reduce costs or improve service performance. Co-creation has become a central theme in service management literature because customers and other actors function as active participants in services (Galvagno and Dalli, 2014; Grönroos and Voima, 2013; Vargo and Lusch, 2016).

This study sets out to organize the conceptual pluralism hindering the development of the research topic. Despite the increasing attention on the concept of co-creation in services, the published reviews (e.g. Galvagno and Dalli, 2014; Ranjan and Read, 2016; Voorberg et al., 2015) and the conceptual works (e.g. Grönroos and Voima, 2013; Payne et al., 2008; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a, b), the extant literature has not been consolidated into a shared definition and a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon. This causes different delineations to proliferate, increasing confusion around “co-creation” (Dong and Sivakumar, 2017; Saarijärvi et al., 2013; Voorberg et al., 2015).

The purpose of the current paper is to synthesize and develop knowledge about the co-creation of services, that is, the activity, practice or process of jointly creating services in specific business contexts. Here, co-creation of services is not examined as the abstract and universal principle of value creation often manifested in the literature inspired by the service-dominant (S-D) logic approach (cf. Vargo and Lusch, 2004), but as an optional collaborative act in the customer–provider interface (a detailed discussion follows in Section 1.1). This paper, in turn, makes a clear distinction between the co-creation of value and the co-creation of services. The value co-creation view presumes that the provider joins the customer’s value creation activities as a co-creator of value during the consumption process (Grönroos and Voima, 2013). The co-creation of services view does not specify whether the provider joins the customer’s sphere or vice versa; instead, it concentrates on the mutual creation of services during service processes and service innovation activities.

To transform the relatively abstract discussions on co-creating services to applicable frameworks serving further theoretical and practical analyses, the present research considers three main questions:

In line with MacInnis’ (2011) notion of different types of conceptual advancement, the present study offers four contributions to service management literature: first, it reduces conceptual pluralism around co-creating services by delineating its relationship to related terminology, such as involvement, engagement, participation, co-design, co-production and co-consumption; second, it identifies an explicit definition of the co-creation of services; third, it provides a differentiated terminology on the outcomes from co-creating services; and finally, it develops an integrative framework that offers a holistic explanation of the co-creation of services.

In response to the research questions, the current focused literature review builds on extant conceptualizations of co-creation and related terminology in service literature. This focused review imitates the systematic review method (SLR) but is not framed as exhaustively; to effectively direct the focus of the analysis on co-creation of services and to ensure the analysis focuses on high-quality scholarly contributions, the study targets the five Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) rated “generic,” i.e., not industry specific, service research journals: Journal of Service Management, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Service Theory and Practice and Service Industries Journal.

This paper begins with an overview of the services research literature that examines the collaborative act in the customer–provider interface, outlining its evolution and pointing tensions. This is followed by the methodology section, which explains the focused literature review approach. Moving to the findings, first the terminology parallel to or corresponding with co-creation of services is examined and reflected against the broader literature base. Second, the results of the thematic analysis of qualifying articles that discovers 63 conceptualizations of co-creation and related terminology are reported and an explicit definition of co-creating services is developed. Third, the review results extend Verleye’s (2015) work on the dimensions of the co-creation experience by arranging both beneficial and counterproductive outcomes in the literature into a typology of outcomes in co-creating services in a business context. Finally, the findings of the focused literature review are combined into an integrative conceptual framework. The paper concludes by discussing promising opportunities for service research, managerial takeaways and limitations.

2. Review approach

In response to the research questions, this paper implements a systematic yet focused literature review approach. Focusing on the service research literature, its main purposes are: to assess, clarify and consolidate the terminology around the co-creation of services and to assess and consolidate the forms and outcomes of co-creating services. By taking an inductive and inclusive approach, allowing similar and neighboring terms to emerge from the literature set, this focused review seeks to disentangle the body of knowledge related to co-creating services and to reduce the existing conceptual pluralism. Because many relevant publications use other labels than co-creating services to denote forms of collaborative creation, using a pre-set keyword search would diminish the richness of the relevant co-creation terminology to be discovered by limiting the analysis to those studies that specifically mention the term. The focused literature review of all articles published in five service journals included the Journal of Service Management, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Service Theory and Practice and Service Industries Journal. Three criteria drove the selection of these journals: first, each journal had to be rated by the SSCI (Thomson Reuters, 2015); second, only journals focusing on services are included; and third, the journals are inclusive and generic service journals and not specific to any particular industry (e.g. healthcare).

While not exhaustive in terms of publication outlets, this review provides a lens to focus on the developments in co-creating services, specifically in the service literature, which is essential given the current confusion with regard to conceptualizing co-creation (Dong and Sivakumar, 2017; Grönroos and Ravald, 2011; Saarijärvi et al., 2013) and calls for more research on the outcomes of co-creating services (Voorberg et al., 2015). The five publication outlets published 2,466 articles between January 2006 and August 2016—a time frame that included the appearance of most co-creation articles (Galvagno and Dalli, 2014). The body of the current theorizing emerged from this set of articles through inductive analysis proceeding in stages, beginning with the analysis of the abstracts of all published articles. To include earlier years, the authors conducted a supplementary SCOPUS search in the five publication outlets of all years before 2006, using all terms identified in the previous analysis as search terms beside co-creation.

To ensure an appropriate structure and objectivity in the selection of literature, the focused literature review followed the four consecutive stages proposed by Booth et al. (2016): literature search, appraise the evidence base, analyze the findings and synthesize the results. To extend coverage in time, a fifth stage that comprised the supplementary SCOPUS analysis of articles prior to 2006 was added. Table II provides an overview of the activities during each of the stages.

Stage 1 included an initial inspection of the titles, keywords and abstracts that were accumulated during the literature search. During this first review, publications were included in the set for the next review step if the focal concept co-creation/cocreation of services was present and the paper included content focusing on outcomes of co-creation; or other relating terms that pointed to collaborative customer-provider creation were identified, including its outcomes; or the publications clearly reflected the results of customer-provider co-creation despite lacking a specific keyword pointing to co-creation. If any ambiguity was perceived, the whole publication was skimmed to determine suitability. Stage 1 resulted in a set of 138 articles.

In Stage 2, the introduction, literature review and methodology sections of the articles were examined. In this inspection, 54 articles were excluded for three reasons. First, scrutinizing several conceptualizations in more detail led to the exclusion of studies that did not relate to collaborative co-creation in practice, such as the customer empowerment study by O’Cass and Ngo (2011). Second, the search targeted co-creation of services in the customer–provider interface, but several articles examined co-creation between employees or firms instead (e.g. Mukherjee and Malhotra, 2006). Third, some articles featured related terms that incorporated meanings different from co-creating services, such as the involvement definition by Zaichkowsky (1985) that presents involvement as the person’s perceived relevance of an object; mere perception of relevance lacks the collaborative aspect in service co-creation. Thus, 84 articles remained for further analysis.

The inspection during Stage 3 included reading of the analysis, results and discussion sections, following the sequence of their assigned numbers. Ten articles were omitted from further analysis because they did not specify service co-creation outcomes for the customer or the service provider. Stage 3 resulted in the final set of 74 articles.

The fourth stage contained the synthesis of the findings, which is presented in the following four sections. Section 3 introduces the identified terminology associated with co-creation in services. Section 4 comprises a thematic analysis of the forms and themes of extant conceptualizations discovered in the 80 articles and develops an explicit definition of co-creating services. Further thematic analysis of the outcomes in Section 5 then provides a typology of beneficial and counterproductive customer and service provider outcomes of co-creating services, classified according to the co-creation experience dimensions of Verleye (2015) and discusses how the terminology of co-creating services differs across the outcomes. Finally, Section 6 develops an integrative framework capturing the identified co-creation forms and outcomes.

In the last stage, to develop a comprehensive picture of the development of the co-creation theme in the five journals, the researchers performed a focused, supplementary SCOPUS search to cover the relevant articles published before 2006. As the searched keywords the authors used the terms that had emerged in the analysis, introduced in Section 3, and the word “outcome” to ensure that all publications included both co-creation of services and addressed consequent outcomes. Six articles passed the screening, growing the data set from 74 to 80 articles and were further included in the syntheses of Stage 4.

Before entering the in-depth conceptual review findings, a brief overview of the reviewed studies is provided here in the form of descriptive statistics. Table III demonstrates how the identified co-creation literature spreads across the five journals. Figure 1 shows the total number of co-creation articles published per year (full years only). Table IV presents the methodological orientation of the articles, showing that 95 percent of the reviewed articles are empirical research.

3. The concept of co-creating services and related terminology

In response to the first research question, the focused literature review identified several terms that subject to a similar meaning as the co-creation of services. The terms that appeared most frequently in the reviewed 80 articles are co-creation (e.g. Russo-Spena and Mele, 2012; Witell et al., 2011), involvement (e.g. Carbonell et al., 2012; Cheng et al., 2012), engagement (e.g. Jahn and Kunz, 2012; O’Brien et al., 2015), participation (e.g. Dong and Sivakumar, 2015; Engström and Elg, 2015), co-design (e.g. Gebauer et al., 2010; Quero and Ventura, 2015), co-production (e.g. Guo et al., 2013; Mende and van Doorn, 2015) and co-consumption/pro-sumption (Quero and Ventura, 2015; Witell et al., 2011). Other terms brought up in the literature, although less frequently, are servuction (Gebauer et al., 2010), collaboration (Ordanini and Parasuraman, 2011), interaction (Alam, 2011) and cooperation (Hsieh et al., 2013).

When scrutinizing the literature of the focused review and of other reviews on the topic, it becomes apparent that there is much debate on the terminological relatedness between the terms. Some authors treat the terms as inclusive, such as when Dong and Sivakumar (2017) suggested using customer participation to encompass co-production and co-creation; Gebauer et al. (2010) proposed that co-creation integrates salient aspects of co-production; Russo-Spena and Mele (2012) depicted co-creation as an overall concept for customer involvement; and Chang and Taylor (2016) implicitly recognized co-creation, co-production and customer involvement as synonyms for customer participation and included them as equal search criteria in their meta-analysis. In their systematic review, Voorberg et al. (2015) showed that researchers often use co-creation and co-production interchangeably. Similarly, Dong and Sivakumar (2017) demonstrated how a multitude of terms have been used to describe customer participation, such as customer engagement, co-production and co-creation, and Mustak et al. (2013, p. 354) denoted co-design, co-development and customer engagement as “other terminology to study the same subject [customer participation].”

This interchangeable use of terms has led to increasing confusion about their conceptual content and blurred the resulting analyses and outcomes. To reduce this misperception, many authors have tried to disentangle the terminology. For example, Dong and Sivakumar (2017) recognized that co-creation, customer participation and co-production belong to the same meaning cluster, while they differentiated customer engagement and customer innovation as related but distinct terms. Regarding customer participation in co-creation, Mustak et al. (2013) differentiated between participation in creating offerings and participation in creating value. Lusch and Vargo (2006) also described two components of co-creation: co-creation of value and co-production. The first is more encompassing and can be determined only by the customer during the consumption process, whereas the latter denotes participation through co-design or shared inventiveness in creating the offering. Similarly, in Etgar’s (2008) model of consumer engagement in co-production, co-creation of value occurs in the consumption stage, but co-production happens during the production process, before usage. Finally, Grönroos and Ravald (2011) and Grönroos and Voima (2013) argued that through interaction in a joint creation process, the customer can get involved as a co-designer, co-developer and co-producer in the service provider’s processes, while the service provider can participate as a value co-creator in the customer’s processes.

This paper suggests that none of the terms are direct synonyms for co-creating services, but that involvement, engagement and participation act as necessary prerequisite-forms (in short, prerequisites) for the co-creation of services to occur. Co-design, co-production and co-consumption are considered specific forms of the co-creation of services that further describe in which phase of the service process co-creating services is taking place. Consider DHL’s co-creation workshops with customers as an example: Customers and DHL employees must be involved in the workshop to take part in co-creating services; actively participate in service co-creation; and finally, be engaged cognitively, behaviorally or affectively (or all at once) before they can be prompted to co-create. Once these prerequisites are fulfilled, customers jointly collaborate with DHL in a process of co-creation; specifically, they co-design solutions during the design and development phases (DHL Solutions & Innovations, 2017).

In an attempt to clarify the concept of co-creation of services and disentangle the conceptual pluralism surrounding it, the following sections compare and contrast the different associated terms based on the 80 articles accumulated through this focused review.

4. Defining the co-creation of services

In response to the second research question, the authors conduct a thematic analysis of the forms and themes of co-creating services that aims to pinpoint and understand where and how service literature converges and diverges (Green et al., 2017). A thematic analysis is a theoretically flexible approach that enables the identification and description of patterns within a literature stream (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006). As a first step in moving toward a definition of the co-creation of services, emerging themes in existing conceptualizations enabled the authors to provide new clarity about the phenomenon of co-creating services. Then, the researchers could synthesize and translate key themes in the different conceptualizations, even if they were expressed using different wording (Thomas and Harden, 2008). The thematic analysis involved careful reading and re-reading of the identified conceptualizations of co-creating services, as summarized in Table V. The label “term” (Column 1, Table V) refers to the seven terms that relate to the co-creation of services (co-creation, involvement, engagement, participation, co-design, co-production and co-consumption). The label “conceptualization of the term” (Column 2) indicates which one of the seven terms in Column 1 is cited by the conceptualization in a particular publication. The different “themes within the conceptualization” (Columns 4–10) provide an overview; these themes may or may not be captured by a specific conceptualization. The following paragraphs explain the procedure of the thematic analysis in more detail.

First, the authors identified which of the selected articles in the focused review provide a conceptualization related to the co-creation of services. Of the 80 articles selected, 51 articles provide 63 conceptualizations that are coded into seven categories depicting a concept or a term: co-creation, involvement, engagement, participation, co-design, co-production and co-consumption/pro-sumption. In total, 29 publications that addressed the collaborative act in the customer–service provider interface do not conceptualize specific terms or their terms occur only infrequently within all selected articles, such as customer cooperation by Hsieh et al. (2013) or collaboration by Ordanini and Parasuraman (2011). Especially for cooperation and collaboration, the low number of conceptualizations is likely because the terms are used rather unconsciously and are often not further delineated. The reliability of coding the 63 conceptualizations into their respective terms was evaluated using Cohen’s Kappa κ. The resulting κ=1 implied perfect inter-rater agreement across the author team (Landis and Koch, 1977). Although the 51 articles provided 63 conceptualizations, not all articles proposed new definitions; some relied on previous works. For example, Edvardsson et al. (2013), Elg et al. (2012) and Melton and Hartline (2015) all cited Witell et al.’s (2011) definition. Yet, no conceptualization appears more than four times across the set of articles, confirming the conceptual fragmentation and need for a consolidating definition.

Second, these conceptualizations were coded according to seven emerging themes, as detailed in Table VI. The seven themes (Columns 4–10, Table V) were derived by reading and re-reading all 63 conceptualizations for any common wording or meaning. For example, “joint,” “customer” and “actor” appear multiple times, as do phrases related to the service process, such as “ideation,” “design,” “development” and “delivery.” Using this common wording or meaning, the authors then developed the different themes. For the assessment of the inter-rater reliability of coding the conceptualizations into the seven themes, the Cohen’s κ value was 0.71, which denotes substantial agreement across the author team (Landis and Koch, 1977). Disagreements were mostly due to language misunderstandings, so they could be resolved by refining the choice of wording of the themes.

Third, the prevalence of each theme, in terms of its absolute number of occurrences, provides the basis for introducing an explicit definition of co-creating services grounded in extant insights. The findings demonstrate a strong emphasis on customer–provider mutual creation, which is not surprising, considering the selection criteria of the focused review. However, the findings also reveal a growing focus on the influence of a multi-actor context (Åkesson et al., 2016; Pinho et al., 2014). This finding is in line with the authors’ presentation of the first and second generation of customer–provider collaboration. Initially, the customer–provider dyad was in the focus, which has shifted toward including the influence of a multi-actor network. Some authors cite resource integration (Pinho et al., 2014; Russo-Spena and Mele, 2012; Sweeney et al., 2015), but most conceptualizations have not adopted this specific term, yet. According to the S-D logic, when resources are integrated, value gets co-created (Vargo and Lusch, 2008), which is an implication similar to the contribution of information by customers (Chang et al., 2013; Witell et al., 2011) or support received from the physical labor of other actors (Dong, 2015) in the co-creation of services. The analysis also reveals an emphasis on joint creation, contrary to mere customer creation, which reflects the focus of the second generation of customer–provider collaboration on the frequent, bidirectional and transparent dialogue between the customer and provider in a joint interface (Chathoth et al., 2013; Gustafsson et al., 2012; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a).

Many studies concentrate on co-creating services during selected phases of the service process (Russo-Spena and Mele, 2012). This research labels these terms as specific forms of co-creating services. Such specific forms of co-creating services, either as new, revised, repeated services or even innovations, include the co-ideation phase (Moeller et al., 2013), co-valuation and co-design phase (Hsieh et al., 2013), co-test and co-launch phase (Xia and Suri, 2014), co-production phase (Chen et al., 2015) and co-consumption phase of a service (Quero and Ventura, 2015). Because all phases are included, this analysis indicates that co-creating services can, but does not have to, manifest itself in all phases of the service process. Based on this thematic analysis, the authors identify an explicit definition of co-creating services, as follows:

The co-creation of services denotes collaborative activities in the customer-provider interface associated with the service; it necessitates the involvement, engagement and participation of at least one customer and one service provider and may lead to beneficial and/or counterproductive outcomes through resource integration. In services, co-creation manifests itself in different forms depending on the phases of the service process (co-ideation, co-valuation, co-design, co-test, co-launch, co-production and co-consumption) and is influenced by a contextual, multi-actor network.

During the thematic analysis, the authors further compared and contrasted the terms associated with co-creating services. Figure 2 depicts the percentage scores for the identified terminology across the seven themes discovered and Table VII summarizes these values as low-, medium-, and high-emphasis categories.

The co-creation terms are associated with the theme of customer–provider emphasis, with the exception of pro-sumption or, as Quero and Ventura (2015) named it, co-consumption. The three studies on co-consumption focus on specific phases rather than the whole service process, because co-consumption predominantly occurs during the use phase. Co-consumption and pro-sumption refer to “collaboration for use and consumption” (Quero and Ventura, 2015, p. 125). Literature covering specific phases of the service process further emphasizes co-design and co-production terms, in addition to referring to co-consumption (Chien and Chen, 2010; Quero and Ventura, 2015; Russo-Spena and Mele, 2012). In contrast, the phases of the service process receive little mentioning by literature that uses co-creation, involvement and engagement terms. This finding supports the authors’ reasoning that co-design, co-production and co-consumption are specific forms of the co-creation of services as they manifest themselves during particular phases of the service process.

Literature exploring the co-consumption term emphasizes the consumption and use phase and pays less attention on customer–provider collaboration theme; instead, the studies addressing co-consumption focus on customer creation. Witell et al. (2011) suggested that the term focuses on customers’ creation activities that lead to the production of offerings, which they finally consume; hence, they focus on the customer’s side. The theme of customer creation also contains studies using the terms engagement and participation, but unlike studies on co-consumption, engagement and participation studies emphasize the customer–provider theme. The notion of multiple actors in the collaborative act is mostly emphasized by studies using the terms co-design and engagement, highlighting other actors beyond the dyadic customer–provider collaboration. As Quero and Ventura (2015, p. 125) explained, co-design “encompasses a wide range of practices based on the engagement of many actors linked by a shared context and interest.”

Finally, all themes share the following three observations. First, co-creation is the only term that is frequently used in all seven themes, underlining both the versatility and the overarching nature of the term. Second, although the idea of resource integration has been advocated in some articles on co-creation, this theme draws only limited and sporadic attention (cf. Åkesson et al., 2016; Pinho et al., 2014) across the literature suggesting the different co-creation terms. Third, the theme that emphasizes joint creation is common across the entire terminology; this expresses the frequent, bidirectional and collaborative nature of co-creating services. Due to the recurrent emphasis of involvement, engagement and participation terms on the joint customer–provider creation, the authors feel further supported in their claim that these three terms are necessary prerequisites for co-creating services, as without them no collaboration between service providers and customers is realizable.

5. A typology of outcomes from co-creating services

To address the third research question, the study develops a typology of outcomes that result for both customers and service providers from co-creation in service provision. This typology synthesizes Verleye’s (2015) research on customer benefits that result from co-creating the service experience with further observations rooted in the current focused review. Analyzing expected benefits from co-creation, Verleye (2015) identified six co-creation experience dimensions that influence the overall co-creation experience, defined as follows: personal benefits: “gaining a better status and recognition”; social benefits: “being able to connect with other people”; hedonic benefits: “having pleasurable experiences”; cognitive benefits: “acquiring new knowledge/skills”; economic benefits: “compensation in line with effort made”; and pragmatic benefits: “solutions better meeting personal needs” (Verleye, 2015, pp. 323-324).

To construct the typology of co-creation outcomes for the current study, the authors used these co-creation experience dimensions as a foundation for the thematic analysis that categorizes the varying outcomes of co-creating services. Given the current focused review approach, discussions on more generic types of service outcomes, common in the broader service literature beyond the co-creation theme, are not included—naturally, all service events should lead to the fulfillment of the value proposition and, subsequently, capture some intended economic or non-monetary value for the provider.

First, in the 80 articles included, 171 individual observations capturing a broad range of co-creation outcomes were identified. Second, the observations were sorted using Verleye’s (2015) co-creation experience dimensions. Third, as the observations included both positive and negative attributions, they were sorted to beneficial and counterproductive outcomes, respectively. Fourth, each observation was sorted in terms of its beneficiary, i.e., whether the outcome addressed the customer or the service provider. Finally, Verleye’s (2015) dimensions were further developed by clustering the observations within each dimension. For example, the personal benefits for the customer include recognition, self-esteem, well-being, quality of life perception and empowerment and ownership; all these concepts represent “gaining a better status and recognition” (Verleye, 2015, p. 324). Illustrated with selected quotations from the literature, Table VIII presents the typology of the beneficial and counterproductive outcomes of co-creating services for the customer and the service provider.

Table VIII reveals that for customers, scholarly contributions emphasize personal, social and pragmatic benefits. Hedonic, cognitive and economic benefits have received less attention, both in terms of absolute number of references and outcome diversity. For personal benefits, previous publications highlight customers’ well-being, especially in terms of financial well-being (Guo et al., 2013; Mende and van Doorn, 2015). Customers’ social benefits, such as the ability to connect with other people, predominantly appear as loyalty with the service provider (Harwood and Garry, 2015; O’Brien et al., 2015) and positive word-of-mouth (intentions) (Ferguson et al., 2010; Tari Kasnakoglu, 2016). The hedonic benefits acknowledge enjoyment and fun as outcomes (Sheng and Zolfagharian, 2014), while the cognitive benefits include new knowledge and skills as beneficial outcomes (Koelling et al., 2010). The economic benefits consist of improved economic gains for the customer (Moeller et al., 2013) and monetary compensation for their efforts (Xia and Suri, 2014). Finally, because co-created services can meet personal needs better, the pragmatic benefits include improved service–customer fit (Alam, 2011), service quality (Gill et al., 2011) and repurchase intentions (Tari Kasnakoglu, 2016).

The beneficial outcomes for customers have received more attention than the counterproductive outcomes. As Table VIII demonstrates, the personal, hedonic, cognitive and economic co-creation experience dimensions for customers contain no counterproductive outcomes. This finding supports Mustak et al. (2013, 2016) who observed a lack of research on counterproductive outcomes following co-creation. An example of a counterproductive social outcome is that following a lack of positive collaboration, customers’ trust and commitment may decline; customers’ frustrations may increase if they perceive their loyalty to be exploited (Harwood and Garry, 2015). Counterproductive pragmatic outcomes for customers may result from diminished efficiency (Dong and Sivakumar, 2015), possibly due to decreased ease of use (Sheng and Zolfagharian, 2014) or lower perceived service quality (Dong et al., 2015).

Table VIII also displays the outcomes following from the co-creation of services for service providers. The cognitive, economic and pragmatic co-creation experience dimensions point toward several beneficial outcomes. The cognitive benefits for service providers include the knowledge and skills to develop new services and improve existing ones together with their customers (Hu and McLoughlin, 2012; Ryzhkova, 2015). Furthermore, the collaborative act with customers positively influences market performance (Carbonell et al., 2012), profit margins (Witell et al., 2011) and sales performance of the new offering (Chien and Chao, 2011)—all important economic benefits. Pragmatic benefits can be realized through shorter time-to-market when introducing new offerings (Chien and Chen, 2010), peer support for services (Melton and Hartline, 2010) and improved efficiency and effectiveness in operations (Bone et al., 2015). The literature rarely discusses hedonic benefits for service providers, although a case study of customer engagement behavior (Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014) shows how co-creation leads to an improved working environment. Previous research suggests that the co-creation of services can lead to the personal benefits of improved decision support for the service provider (Pinho et al., 2014) and a better provider image (Toivonen and Tuominen, 2009). Social benefits identified include better synergy (Hsieh et al., 2013), contract retention with customers (Burdon et al., 2015) and cross-functional integration and teamwork within the service provider (Alam, 2011; Chien and Chen, 2010).

A major counterproductive personal outcome for the service provider involves knowledge sharing, which leads to increased uncertainty about who owns the service and calls for better service protection against imitation (Hurmelinna-Laukkanen and Ritala, 2010). Possible counterproductive economic outcomes for the service provider that can follow from co-creation include declining market performance (Carbonell et al., 2012) and a negative effect on the product success of radical innovations (Gustafsson et al., 2012). Additionally, employees’ job stress, role conflict and perceived workload are interrelated counterproductive outcomes associated with personal, social and economic outcome dimensions for providers (Hsieh et al., 2004; Hsieh and Yen, 2005). More specifically, Hsieh and Yen (2005) proposed that customer participation increases job stress of employees, due to role conflicts between customers and employees following changes in job characteristics.

To clarify the conceptual pluralism surrounding the concept of co-creation in services, the authors further compared and contrasted the identified outcomes against the terminology of co-creating services. Table VII summarizes this comparison and reports on the occurrence of beneficial and counterproductive outcomes across the terminology for customers and service providers.

Cross-comparison of the identified outcomes against the terms used in the same study reveals that literature using the co-creation term suggests a variety of beneficial outcomes for nearly all customer and provider experience dimensions, except for the hedonic dimension. However, the publications addressing co-creation do not identify many counterproductive outcomes; Osei-Frimpong et al. (2015), on the possibility of value destruction, and Gustafsson et al. (2012), on diminished success of the offerings, are the only contributions of co-creation terms to counterproductive outcomes. This finding demonstrates the research gap between the investigation of beneficial and counterproductive outcomes, supporting earlier reviews (Mustak et al., 2013, 2016).

Interestingly, publications using the involvement term are predominantly suggesting outcomes for service providers, with only two publications contributing to customer outcomes—Chen et al. (2016) mentioned a positive effect on customers’ moods and Magnusson et al. (2003) proposed improvements in perceived user value. Especially, for the cognitive, economic and pragmatic experience dimensions, there is a broad body of involvement literature proposing outcomes for service providers.

Contrary to involvement literature, publications on the engagement term indicate hardly any outcomes for the service provider, with the exception of Jaakkola and Alexander (2014), who reported on a positive working atmosphere. There are several outcomes mentioned by engagement studies for customers, however, they are focused only on the personal and social experience dimensions. This comprises another difference between the engagement and involvement terms: while there are many outcomes from involvement publications for the cognitive, economic and pragmatic experience dimensions, there are no outcomes from engagement publications on these dimensions. Analogously, there are no outcomes from involvement literature for the personal and social experience dimensions, but many outcomes from engagement literature for these dimensions.

For publications highlighting the participation term, the authors find that the outcomes are relatively evenly divided across the experience dimensions and the customer and service provider perspectives. Notably though, participation literature identifies more counterproductive outcomes than any other term. While counterproductive outcomes for the service provider are mostly suggested for the personal, social and economic dimensions, counterproductive outcomes for the customer are proposed for the pragmatic experience dimension.

Finally, there are only few outcomes suggested by co-production articles and no outcomes specifically mentioned for co-design and co-consumption literature. One possible reason for this finding is that the publications that cover outcomes for co-design, co-production and co-consumption rarely suggest these outcomes for the respective term alone. Any publication that named the same outcome for more than one term was not categorized by this research after a specific term, but under the category “Not specified.” When scrutinizing the publications in this category (Chien and Chen, 2010; Gebauer et al., 2010; Hwang and Kim, 2011; Russo-Spena and Mele, 2012; Quero and Ventura, 2015; Witell et al., 2011), many articles appear to include one or more terms of the co-design, co-production and co-consumption terms. Chien and Chen (2010) reported on customer involvement, customer participation and co-production; Gebauer et al. (2010) proposed co-creation, engagement, co-design, co-production and co-consumption (pro-sumption); Russo-Spena and Mele (2012) covered co-creation and co-design; and finally, Quero and Ventura (2015) suggested co-creation, co-design and co-consumption. More specifically, Quero and Ventura (2015) proposed co-design and co-consumption as certain types of co-creation; Chien and Chen (2010) defined co-production as customers’ role in the early phases of developing new offerings; Russo-Spena and Mele (2012) termed co-design as a phase of the co-creative innovation process; and Witell et al. (2011) implicated that pro-sumption denotes co-creation, but only during the consumption phase. Conclusively, these findings further support the authors’ proposition that co-design, co-production and co-consumption can be considered specific forms of co-creating services that occur in particular phases of the service process.

6. Conclusion: an integrative framework for co-creating services

This focused review set out to conceptually clarify the co-creation of services and name its forms and outcomes. Grounded in the findings of the thematic analysis of forms, themes and outcomes in the examined literature, the authors develop an integrative framework to achieve comprehensive conceptualization of co-creation of services and the associated terminology (Figure 3) and further suggest examples of industry practices for the specific forms of co-creating services (Table IX).

7. Discussion