Special Issue: The Value Co-Creation Revolution

We are now in the middle of an era when companies compete to give customers what they want, where, how, when and with whom they want it. Call it the creative economy, the social media marketing revolution or stakeholder value innovation, its happening all around us. So this publication looks forward at how customers are engaging with leading companies to enrich the experience of developing and using products and services, and how these engagement platforms are fostering innovation and in some cases evolving into new businesses units.But the issue also looks backward to a landmark in the value revolution some 10 years ago when the late C.K. Prahalad and his co-author Venkat Ramaswamy introduced readers to the co-creation of value with customers paradigm. At that time many observers thought that concepts like mass customization and experiential marketing offered the ultimate in customer value. Over the decade, the Internet and other engagement platforms where stakeholders from around the world can interact to contribute their insights and experience to the design of products and services have made co-creation of value with customers a new arena of competition and in the process are changing the economics of innovation.