Customer Participation: Co-creating Knowledge with Customers

The customer is considered to have potential to make contributions to value creation that are of mutual benefits to all actors in the value creating system. Encouraging customers to be "co-producers" is considered to be the next frontier in competitive effectiveness. However, despite this ongoing research into customer participation, little attempt has been made study value co-creation from the view of co-creating knowledge with customer. This research seeks to fill this gap. Customer participation is defined as the degree to which customer and companies co-create knowledge through mutual interactions. This paper is started by detailing previous researches on customer participation and customer knowledge management. It then looks at four different roles customers play in knowledge co-creation-passive user, active informer, knowledge seeker, and collaborative knowledge co-creator- each with different level of customer participation. It next put forward the model of knowledge co-creation cycle of customer participation. The paper is concluded by delineating some implication. It suggests that firms need to consider the purpose for which customer knowledge is required, consider the appropriate level of integration of systems to deliver kinds of customer knowledge that are necessary and proceed cautiously- guide customers from passive user to active collaborator step by step.