Managing customers’ creativity for co-creative innovation

Contemporary management has seen a shift in innovation practices to harness the knowledge and creativity of customers, and other stakeholders, through collaborative platforms that facilitate the co-creation of innovation. While an emerging body of literature emphasises the role of co-creation in innovation, marketing and service researchers have not considered the role of customer creativity in this process. Commonly creativity is considered through the number of ideas generated as outcomes, but this study investigates the essence of customer creativity through an individual’s creative self-efficacy, creative role identity, and ideational behavior, and in doing so takes a socio-cultural approach to creativity to arrive at new, innovative ideas. We develop a conceptual model that explicates the individual, social and system drivers of the customers’ ideational behaviour and willingness to participate in co-creation for innovation, and the self-enrichment that emerges from the innovation task and community.