THE POWER OF CO-CREATION: EXAMINING CUSTOMERS' WILLINGNESS TO CO-CREATE AS THE MISSING LINK TO EXPLAIN THE ADOPTION OF TECHNOLOGY-BASED SERVICES

摘要

Ever since the rise of mass-production in the 20th century spurred the development of a consumer society a customer's role was the one of purchase and consumption (Xie et al., 2008). However, with the emergence of the internet and mobile telecommunication, today's customers have the possibility to actively engage in the provision and consumption of various offerings wherever and whenever they like (Kleijnen et al., 2007). This active engagement of the customer is known in research and practice as customer co-creation of value or simply customer co-creation (Dong et al. 2008). Especially for technology-based services (TBS), the active engagement of the customer in the service provision and consumption is crucial for a successful innovation adoption and diffusion (Chan et al. 2010). If, for example, customers were not willing to share information about their activities, opinions and interests, follow other users or upload photos in the internet and thus were not willing to co-create the service platform of Twitter, it would not be one of the biggest social networking and microblogging services in the world. Hence, a customer' s willingness to co-create (WCC) seems to be an important factor within TBS adoption. However, existent research has focused on individual differences and innovation characteristics as the primary predictors of TBS adoption, thus largely neglecting the role of WCC (Dabholkar and Bagozzi 2002; Meuter et al. 2005). Hence, little is known on what actually constitutes a customer's willingness to co-create and how it influences the adoption and diffusion of TBS (Ostrom et al. 2010). In order to close this research gap the purpose of this research is to clarify how a customer's willingness to co-create influences the adoption of technology-based services and complements the well-known individual differences and innovation characteristics in predicting customer adoption of TBS.