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Monica Sun, Associate Professor, Questrom School of Business, Boston University
Pending Synopsis
Reconciling Cocreation Logics through Institutional Work
Albert Muniz, Professor, Driehaus College of Business, DePaul University
Synopsis
Corporations recognize the strategic advantages of harnessing user ingenuity; however, beyond cases of successful, narrowly scoped and/or temporally limited collaborations, little is known about what undergirds enduring cocreation. We assert that the extant literature on cocreation reveals two operating institutional logics: market and community. We evidence a profound cleavage between these logics in the marketplace which feeds into a similar institutional chasm in academic literature. Utilizing the construct of ideal types, we distinguish market and community cocreation logics and discover that within both, participants quest for mastery and affiliation. Toward a more comprehensive understanding of prolonged multi-stakeholder cocreation, we study reconciliation of divergent stakeholder perspectives on cocreation within the LEGO Ideas cocreation platform. We find that users thwarted in mastery and affiliation, utilize exit, voice and loyalty to assert their agency within cocreation initiatives. Likewise, firms looking for sustainable cocreation cannot take consumer mastery and affiliation for granted and must recognize the gap in logics from the outset, and be willing to engage in institutional work towards a unified logic.