High customer involvement: an essential element for effective co-creation

Understanding customer needs for meeting the customer expectations and to provide customer satisfaction is pivotal for the long term sustainability of the firm. Customer involvement, through 'co-creation' for developing the products and services will ensure this sustainability. This paper explains the meaning of co-creation, state the difference between co-creation and customisation- the most closely associated term with co-creation and elongates the difference between customerisation and crowdsourcing activities. This paper projects firms understanding of the co-creation concept and give suggestive ways and direction of concept implementation in an organisation. Research is conducted by using secondary sources and used in context of clarifying the concept of co-creation viz a viz other overlapping concepts. Two disguised caselets are also used to build clarity of the concept. On the basis of current literature, caselets and theoretical understanding we propose that an activity with high customer involvement, preferably at each stage of development of product and services can be called as a criteria to qualify for an activity to be termed as co-creation.