Leveraging customer co-creation platform for firm innovative performance

"In this digital era, companies are increasingly adopting digital platforms as a strategic tool for stimulating product innovations and managing customer relationships. Notably, businesses are eager to build digital customer platforms that leverage the power of collective wisdom (through customer co-creation) to develop and market new products. However, the exact link of customer co-creation to innovation performance has remained unclear (Chang & Taylor, 2016; Fang, 2008). Notably, recent research has reported intriguing—and contrasting—findings on the business implications of digital platforms (Cenamor, Parida, & Wincent, 2019; Tse et al., 2023).

This proposal was partially inspired by the PI’s forthcoming article in European Journal of Marketing (Tse et al., 2023), which documents the divergent effects of digital customer platforms on customer perceptions of corporate brand image. In the proposed research, we highlight the conditions under which digital customer platforms would increase customer contributions to corporate innovation performance. We aim to add to the emerging literature on digital platforms and customer co-creation by delineating the mechanism through which customer platforms bolster innovation performance: namely, by facilitating competence ambidexterity (i.e., the capability to achieve both competence exploration and competence exploitation simultaneously).
Drawing on the resource-based view and the contingency theory, we propose that customer platforms are conducive to competence ambidexterity, which is a key driver of innovation performance, as revealed in previous literature (Rothaermel & Deeds, 2004). To illuminate the link between customer platforms and competence ambidexterity, we further identify the moderating influences of two types of contingencies: (1) internal contingencies (customer assets breadth and interfuctional coordination) that concern knowledge acquisition and integration and (2) external contingencies (market uncertainty and competitor imitation) that reflect market dynamism."