Abstract Customer co-creation, the practice of involving the customer in a firm’s new product development, has received increasing attention. We develop a unique analytical model to study co-creation and examine the conditions under which co-creation is economically beneficial for both the customer and the firm. In our model, the customer and the firm determine (simultaneously or sequentially) their innovation share in the co-created product, directly affecting their share in the development costs and the final co-created product quality. The firm decides the product price (affecting customer demand, firm revenues and customer purchasing costs) and its level of manufacturing flexibility (affecting its unit production cost and fixed investment). Our model generates new and important insights. We show that when the consumer surplus and firm profit are both positive, both the customer and firm want to “engage”in co-creation, and when either the customer or the firm obtains a negative economic value from co-creation they prefer to avoid co-creation. We find that co-creation thrives when customers are more sensitive to quality and less sensitive to price, the environment is less investment intensive, and demand for the product is high. Under these conditions, the co-created product quality and the firm’s flexibility increase. How innovation efforts are shared between the customer and the firm is an important instrument to guide the co-creation process. When the customer is first to contribute to co-creation, our results show that both the customer’s share in the innovation effort and the final co-created product quality increase.

中文翻译：

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参与或逃避共同创造？分析模型

摘要 客户共创，即让客户参与公司新产品开发的实践，越来越受到关注。我们开发了一个独特的分析模型来研究共同创造并检查共同创造对客户和公司都具有经济利益的条件。在我们的模型中，客户和公司决定（同时或顺序）他们在共同创造产品中的创新份额，直接影响他们在开发成本和最终共同创造产品质量中的份额。公司决定产品价格（影响客户需求、公司收入和客户采购成本）及其制造灵活性水平（影响其单位生产成本和固定投资）。我们的模型产生了新的重要见解。我们表明，当消费者剩余和企业利润都为正时，顾客和企业都想“参与”共同创造，而当顾客或企业从共同创造中获得负的经济价值时，他们宁愿避免共同创造。我们发现，当客户对质量更敏感而对价格更不敏感、环境投资密集度较低并且对产品的需求很高时，共同创造就会蓬勃发展。在这些条件下，共同创造的产品质量和公司的灵活性增加。如何在客户和公司之间分享创新努力是指导共同创造过程的重要工具。当客户首先为共同创造做出贡献时，我们的结果表明，客户在创新努力中的份额和最终共同创造的产品质量都会提高。