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The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the “interacted” actor and connect it with practices of managerial value creation in an interactive business world. In doing so, it accounts for the interactive agency of actors via dynamics of the creational process across increasing technological “platformization” of interactions of heterogeneous (human and non-human) sociomaterial entities.

The study discusses a foundational theoretical framework of a co-creation paradigm (CCP) while connecting it with recent industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) literature on mixed network and system ontology. It then elaborates on conceptual research contributions and key business management implications in advancing IMP studies through CCP.

The framing of interactional flows across interactive system environments in business networks is related to both stability and developmental change in the enactment of creation via interactive agencies-structures in the ongoing pursuits of both business efficiency and innovation of value creational opportunities.

By effectively configuring platformed networked interactions of experience value creation in their business contexts, managers (and stakeholding individuals in general) can better cope with the complexity of interactivity and interdependencies.

Managerial experience value co-creation through CCP builds on the IMP tradition by explicitly recognizing actors, in addition to activities and resources as being interactively defined. Because the relational logics are applicable at varying levels of scale across system-environment boundaries, it can be applied at both the individual and company levels or more generally at any level of agglomeration.

The traditional system of company‐centric value creation (that has served us so well over the past 100 years) is becoming obsolete. Leaders now need a new frame of reference for value creation. In the emergent economy, competition will center on personalized co‐creation experiences, resulting in value that is truly unique to each individual. The authors see a new frontier in value creation emerging, replete with fresh opportunities. In this new frontier the role of the consumer has changed from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active. As a result, companies can no longer act autonomously, designing products, developing production processes, crafting marketing messages, and controlling sales channels with little or no interference from consumers. Armed with new tools and dissatisfied with available choices, consumers want to interact with firms and thereby co‐create value. The use of interaction as a basis for co‐creation is at the crux of our emerging reality. The co‐creation experience of the consumer becomes the very basis of value. The authors offer a DART model for managing co‐creation of value processes.

In this interview with Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy, Strategy & Leadership reviews the way the concept of co-creation of value with customers is being implemented on its tenth anniversary. Prof. Ramaswamy explains the basic elements of the co-creation playbook.

Based on his research with companies pioneering innovation co-creation with customers, Prof. Ramaswamy offers insights for executives into what makes this perspective different and powerful.

Prof. Ramaswamy discusses the guiding principle underlying the transformation of enterprises towards co-creation: how to engage people to create valuable experiences together while enhancing network economics.

In designing and managing a co-creation platform, ask, how accessible is it to consumers or any other key stakeholders; how well does it facilitate dialogue among them; how transparent is this interaction to all, which helps to build trust and attract even more participants; and how well does it enable the reflexive leveraging of the innovation and learning generated to enhance the value of the platform?

Senior executives need to know how co-creation engagement platforms can also be used to generate ideas for continuously improving products and services through the lens of customer experiences.

This second part of Strategy & Leadership's interview with Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy, one of the early proponents of co-creating value with stakeholders, asks him about the progress of the “co-creation transformation” of markets on its tenth anniversary and its wider implications for firm strategists and public policy makers. The interview concludes with a remembrance of the late C.K. Prahalad, a co-developer of the theory, and reviews his many contributions to the advancement of strategic management.

This interview considers how the co-creation view starts with interactions as the locus of value and platforms of engagements with individuals as the locus of value creation.

The co-creation paradigm is a dynamic perspective that sees the interaction of customers, employees and other stakeholders as forums for learning and ever-expanding capability building.

Strategy as “stretch and leverage” in the world of co-creation becomes about joint aspirations>joint resources.

Corporate managers need to understand that leading companies that have successfully adopted the co-creation model follow a simple principle – they focus their entire organization on the engagements with individuals.

A new player has emerged to influence the buying behavior of customers – the webmaven. Marketers and product developers must take in account that webmavens now have a huge potential audience for their reviews of products and services. An active program of tracking, measuring and marketing to these influential infomediaries is likely to reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises. For many firms, marketing to mavens, hobbyist and rating sites may also prove to be a strategic and cost effective means to stimulate innovation and revenue growth.

Shows how marketing to mavens, hobbyist and rating sites can be implemented.

The good news for decision makers is that access to comments from webmaven websites can provide product managers with fresh intelligence on the failures and successes that customers are experiencing with their offerings. The bad news is that the negative feedback from just one or two influential webmavens can influence a brand's reputation, sometimes with the same dire effect as poor reviews in traditional media such as Consumer Reports or PC Magazine.

Journalistic research.

R&D – take advantage of Internet customer and user experience to research new innovations and develop new features based upon rapid and early user feedback. Product defect tracking – track user complaints, ratings and reviewer critiques about your, competitive and leading edge or deviant product[9] usage to frame future product development. Market research – measure share of mind on the Internet, in traditional media, at rating sites, at review sites. Maven management – pay special attention to the heavily involved user and hobbyist sites.

Alerts managers to the power of these new market influencers and provides a how‐to guide for marketing to webmavens and other infomediaries on the Internet.

With their new theory about the coming revolution in value creation, C.K. Prahalad and his new collaborator, Venkat Ramaswamy, seek to go further than they or other strategy writers have gone. In their new book The Future of Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), they aim to shift our whole business paradigm, or “dominant logic”, by impelling us to rethink the very nature of competition as we have come to know it. The fundamental idea in The Future of Competition is that in the business world of tomorrow, value will be interactively co‐created by companies and consumers, rather than merely exchanged between them. The emergence of more connected, informed and active consumers is transforming the company‐consumer relationship. We are moving from a world in which our view of value creation is company‐centric and product/service focused to one that will be more consumer‐centric and experience focused. The transition will not happen overnight, but the implications are enormous, and already visible to those who know where to look.

This case shows how a set of six steps that captured the essence of implementing co-creation thinking to promote transformational change were applied in a complex corporate manufacturing operation in India.

This case describes how the co-creation paradigm of value creation was applied step by step in the quality function across the five operating sites of Mahindra's Automotive Division, a subsidiary of the conglomerate Mahindra Group. The case also looks at the results as the initial experiment expanded.

By enlisting employees and a range of other stakeholders the firm was able to greatly improve product quality. The success of the initial program caused executives in other units of the firm to become co-creation of value process champions.

The six-step process is: 1. Identify key stakeholders and increase their willingness to engage. 2. Set up platforms purposefully designed to engage individuals more co-creatively, with environments of interactions configured around people's “lived” experiences. 3. Identify and support new co-creation champions. 4. Expand the circle of stakeholders and joint value creation opportunities. 5. Deepen the impact and enable the viral spread of “win more-win more” value creation in the enterprise ecosystem. 6. Engage stakeholders across private, public, and social sectors to expand wealth, welfare and well-being for the benefit of all.

Co-authored by a leading authority on the theory of co-creation of value and a senior executive at a large corporation, this case will be useful to practicing managers in all industries.