Paper info

The role of context in investigating service experience co-creation – implications for studying dyadic business to business service relationships

Johanna Still and Hanna Komulainen

The paper was published at the 32nd IMP-conference in Poznan, Poland in 2016.

This study explores the role of context in service experience co-creation, especially with regard to dyadic service relationships. Even though service experience co-creation has received quite much attention in recent years, it has been argued that there are still gaps in our knowledge about the role of context in it. It has also been argued that it is not only the immediate context of co-creation – for example between a service provider and a customer in a specific time and place – that influences the co-creation but the much wider environment that surrounds it. Recently there has been plenty of research that investigates this by zooming out, i.e. studying co-creation from a macro perspective where one searches for the big picture and generic concepts rather than details. We, however, suggest that there is still a need to pay attention also to the “basic unit” of everyday business relationships, i.e. dyadic relationship between service provider and customer, to better understand service experience co-creation in practice. The present study suggests a conceptual framework that clarifies the context in which a dyadic relationship is embedded. It serves and guides the future empirical research, which will be conducted on service experience co-creation in dyadic knowledge-intensive business service relationships.