Journey of Co-creation from Marketing to Management Literature: A Narrative Literature Review

Abstract

Abstract

Research on interpersonal collaboration for creative work started in the early
1970s by management scholars. Later on, the concept of value co-creation was
first presented in the marketing literature by Prahalad and Ramaswamy in 2004.
Since then, there has been significant development on the value co-creation
concept by marketing scholars who contributed a lot regarding value co-creation
literature. Due to this reason, a perception was developed that the concept of
relational co-creation is related only to the field of marketing. However, over the
period, the concept of value co-creation transformed into a relational co-creation
construct that has been increasingly used in the literature of human resource
management as well. Concepts such as relational co-creation, HR co-creation, and
intimate co-creation are getting the increased attention of management scholars.
However, there is no previous narrative review that summarized the co-creationbased literature concerning its emergence from marketing towards human
resource management. The current study has addressed this literature gap with the
help of a narrative literature review by reviewing 46 peer-reviewed research
papers and 4 books from established databases. Results revealed that the concept
of value co-creation in marketing had an inspiration from the co-innovation
concept earlier applied in the field of design engineering. The value co-creation
concept’s popularity in marketing literature and practice made it a source of
discussion for relational co-creation in HRM and management literature with the
evolution of intimate co-creation and HR co-creation in the literature of
management. These developments have exceptional implications for management
scholars and practitioners.

Key Words: Narrative review, value co-creation, HR co-creation, intimate co-creation, PRISMA framework, relational co-creation

JEL Classification: M 19, J 24