infonet-economy

Co-creation on the Internet mainly refers to product development tasks undertaken in collaboration with customers, though customers participate even more closely in service creation. As the relational potential of customer-firm interactions becomes increasingly important, this article attempts to foster a deeper understanding of the role of the Internet in different types of service and innovation processes, capable of both generating implicit knowledge in a value network of collaborating actors and bringing ideas to the market. A cross-case study reveals that operant resources on the Internet build around the buying process of the customer while also drawing a circle through the value chain. The architecture of the value chain changes from a single-directed stream to a loop of knowledge exchange that includes almost every vertical stage. When exploiting the relational capacity of customer-firm interactions on the Internet, firms therefore cannot assign customer input to a certain functionality but rather must decipher it through interdisciplinary approaches that involve the cooperation of multiple areas.