7, Measurement – is co-creation worth it?

(This series of posts is based on my literature review – ask me for sources in the comments.)

What are the outcomes of co-creation? That is hard to answer. Only few of the co-creation frameworks include measurement as an element, and less than half of reviewed publications talk about measurement of co-creation in any depth. Even half of those explicitly point out that co-creation measurement is not appropriately addressed either in practice, nor in academia. See a collection of quotes at the bottom.

Some papers mention importance of expected versus perceived value for customers, and its related traditional service measurement approaches ( SERVQUAL, RATER, PERVAL, EXQ, VALEX ), but without validating them for co-creation specifically.

Even more alarming is that some papers promise reduction of investment costs and increase in efficiency, while another paper predicts the exact opposite, higher costs and reduced efficiency. And while most papers only consider the company’s perspective, and not the customer’s, even those that consider the customer perspective only look at the gains, but not the negative impacts.

On a positive note, one research paper focused specifically on co-creation experiences. This paper (‘The co-creation experience from the customer perspective: its measurement and determinants’) introduced the customer-specific “multidimensional co-creation experience scale”, consisting of 6 dimensions. These are :

• the hedonic (having pleasurable experiences),
• cognitive (acquiring new knowledge or skills),
• social (connecting with other people),
• personal (better status and recognition),
• pragmatic (solutions better meeting personal needs)
• and economic (compensation in line with effort made) dimensions.

I used this framework to structure the benefits and negative impacts from the publications that listed anything specific. I extended the use of the above model to companies as well – which worked surprisingly well – see summary table below.

Here are the quotes from various publications complaining about lack of measurement: “Both academics and practitioners would greatly benefit from a more comprehensive understanding associated value outcomes for the parties involved.”; “Empirical work about the outcomes of co-creation is rather limited and paid scant attention to customer experience.”; “More work is needed to develop measurement or interpretation scales. Managerial and organizational impact of service experience co-creation is still scarce and fragmented”.

This marks the last element in my literature review structure. The next two posts will sum up this Chapter.