Value co creation: concept and measurement
The surge in academic and practical interest in the topic of value co creation (VCC) highlights an equivocal understanding of its conceptual boundaries and empirical constituents. Our search of the diverse scholarly literature on VCC identified 149 papers, from which we extract the two primary conceptual VCC dimensions of co production and value in use. Though the combination of these two distinct dimensions is theoretically necessary to describe VCC, 79% of the studies in our dataset consider only one or the other. Such underlying theoretical ambiguity may explain conflicting results in earlier studies and motivates our effort to offer four contributions to the literature. First, we conduct a rigorous review, integrating existing work to expose the theoretical core of VCC. Second, we utilize the results from our review to isolate the two main theoretical dimensions of VCC and expose the three conceptual elements which underlie each dimension. Third, we apply our theoretical findings to derive empirical measurement constructs for each dimension. Fourth, we refine, analyze, and test the resulting measurement index in an investigation into consumer satisfaction.