How to engage customers in service-oriented value co-creation efficiently?

Abstract Nowadays the entire socio economic has been experiencing the transition from product-dominant toward service-dominant. Meanwhile, the way to interact with customers has been changed from transaction-based to relationship- and process-based in companies. As a result, the customer’s contributions to business have been shifting from passively consuming the goods offered by firms toward actively co-creating the value with companies. However, how to engage customers in the co-creation process efficiently is still not clear and little relevant researches are found. The objectives of the study are, firstly by reviewing the existing literatures to provide a holistic picture of the value co-creation with all contextual clues included in a systematic manner in order to mirror the evolution of the value co-creation and further to clarify the concepts and inspire the future research. Secondly by conducting a case study on Nokia’s IdeasProject to analyze how should companies co-create value with customers in order to achieve efficiency. The diamond of value creation (Ramaswamy, 2009) and the DART model (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004) are utilized in facilitating the case study and driving the discussion. The findings derived from this study highlight that the value co-creation with customers as a process cannot work solely, it has to be cooperated with innovative business model and supportive innovation management in order to achieve the efficiency. In addition, the key elements identified in the development evolution of the value co-creation do have effect on the customer value co-creation process and need to be taken into account for companies while developing the co-creation strategy, e.g., the government force has an impact on the participating behaviors of customers. However, this study didn’t conduct analysis from the business model perspective or innovation management perspective that deserves future research