Co-creation, prevailing streams and a future design trajectory

Abstract

Co-creation as a concept has won terrain over the past 10 years. In practice as well as in literature, co-creation is climbing the agenda in relation to contemporary opportunities and challenges within management, organisation design and change initiatives. This paper aims to build an overview of the literature on co-creation to explore what the existing literature relates to and indeed to pinpoint if any patterns or streams can be identified. The paper illustrates how the use of the concept of co-creation suggests a necessity for focusing further on specific co-creation-related issues and challenges of significance to business and society. The paper highlights new co-creation-related issues and challenges. Further, the paper crystallises an emerging design trajectory in theory and practice.

Keywords::

• co-creation
• value creation
• design thinking
• outside–in
• value potential
• strategy

Notes

^1. The database includes more than 18,000 peer-reviewed journals from over 5000 international publishers, carrying a total of more than 41 million records. The database also includes more than 435 million scientific web pages. However, the web content is not included in this literature review.

^2. An open-ended search using the same search string, with all document types, and all search fields results in 2007 documents, 1909 of these being in the English language.

^3. The number of documents in the final search has changed over the course of the period of time when the numbers were extracted. Therefore, the number of documents referred to is at times 493 and at other times 494. This shows how the field is dynamic and rapidly developing.

^4. Non-English language documents account for 52 out of a total of 545 for all languages. The French top the list of non-English documents in this search with a total of 21, far ahead of the followers with almost three times as many as Slovene with 8 documents, and German 6.

^5. None of the 11 articles, which include both co-creation and cocreation, has intentionally used both terms.

^6. This is in spite of the fact that the by far most influential article in the field uses the term cocreation (Vargo and Lusch 2004).