Co-creation of value for user experiences Chapter | 5 69in performing an activity, the meaning, the experience, and value of the users
when using the product. The “what” addresses the things people can do with
a product—its functionality, that is, able to provide the experience that users
expected. The “how” is concerned with designing functionality in an accessible
and aesthetically pleasing way.
5.4 Co-creation of value
In today’s world, it is important that we move away from a product and firm-
centric view to personalized consumer experiences in design of product and
services. The reason is that today consumers are more informed, networked, and
empowered. Consumers demanded cocreating value with the firm (Prahalad &
Ramaswamy, 2004).
According to Gambetti and Graffigna (2010), nowadays customers, empow-
ered by the web and the associated information technologies, want to cocre-
ate value to build their identities, express themselves creatively, socialize with
other consumers and enjoy a unique and memorable experience. Cocreation is
an alternative, collaborative approach that can bring the design of ITS systems
closer to their future users. It is important that we design ITS in collaboration
with the end users through the cocreation of value.
The social, cultural, economic, and technological changes enable organiza-
tions, groups and individuals to interact, collaborate, and solve problems by
jointly generating solutions and creating value (Chesbrough, 2011; Ramas-
wamy & Gouillart, 2010) known as cocreation.
According to Russo-Spena and Mele (2012), there are three research streams
that stand out as starting points in the analysis of cocreation in innovation stud-
ies: the technology-driven perspective, the customer-driven perspective, and
the service-driven perspective. The technology-driven perspective focuses on
collaboration through an open innovation platform (Chesbrough, 2006); the
customer-driven perspective emphasizes the systematic use of individuals’ and
communities’ competences and experiences and the service-driven perspective
introduces the exciting notions of value in use and the customer as value cocre-
ator (Vargo and Lusch, 2004).
Cocreation is an active, creative, and social process, involving a set of activi-
ties based on collaboration between producers and users that is initiated by the
firm to generate value for customers. According to Ramaswamy and Gouillart
(2010), the idea of cocreation is to unleash the creative energy of many people,
such that it transforms both their individual experience and the economics of the
organization that enabled it.
In cocreation, it is important to engage, work with and empower users
and designers to generate ideas and to collaboratively create concepts. The
users’ presence is essential in the creative process because users provide
insight into what is valuable to them. Because the value of each user is differ-
ent, cocreation brings together users and designers to work toward a shared