Exploring Links Between Engaging Customers in Value Co-Creation and Product Innovativeness

The study examines the hypothesis that firms engaging customers in value co-creation tend to display more innovativeness. As such, it is one of the few quantitative studies on the link between these two concepts. Customer engagement in value co-creation was operationalized as a multiple scale following the DART framework by Prahalad and Ramaswamy. The DART acronym denotes four salient dimensions of enabling co-creation: Dialog, Access, Risk and Transparency. The applied innovativeness metric was revenue share from new and modified products. Data were collected from 432 managers of manufacturing and service SMEs. Statistical data analysis methods included EFA, CFA and multiple regression modeling