It surveys how this term is defined in the published literature — what the sources agree on, where they diverge and what remains contested — and carries its own numbered bibliography. It does not describe what we run. Programme policy is on the core pages.
Our own use of the word is often narrower than general usage; the short definition and the boundary are in the glossary, under Co-creation. The review date below matters, because the literature moves.
A definitional review. Citations follow IEEE style; see References.
Abstract
Co-creation is used across at least four largely independent traditions — participatory design, public-service co-production, value co-creation in marketing, and service-dominant logic — which define it differently and rarely cite one another. It has no settled definition, and the one systematic review that measured the point found co-creation and co-production used interchangeably. This article separates the traditions, sets out the feature distinguishing co-creation from consultation and from collaboration, and reports the record’s limits.
I. Definition
There is no single accepted definition. Four are in circulation, and they are not equivalent.
The broadest, from design research, is any act of collective creativity, i.e. creativity that is shared by two or more people [1]. The strongest is the service-dominant logic premise that the customer is always a co-creator of value [2] — a claim about all economic exchange, not a description of a method. The most operational, from public administration, covers co-creation and co-production together as “a joint effort of citizens and public sector professionals in the initiation, planning, design and implementation of public services” [3]. The marketing account is definitional by implication: value creation is “rapidly shifting from a product- and firm-centric view to personalized consumer experiences”, with consumers “increasingly co-creating value with the firm” [4]. (Read in abstract only in this pass.)
The instability is documented, not inferred: in 2008 design researchers recorded co-design and co-creation as “often confused and/or treated synonymously”, and online dictionaries as having no entries at all [1].
II. Origins
Co-creation has four origins, largely independent of one another.
Participatory design (Northern Europe, 1970s). Collective creativity in design “has been around for nearly 40 years, going under the name participatory design” [1]. The Scandinavian Collective Resource Approach engaged workers in developing workplace systems, combining designers’ expertise with “the situated expertise of the people whose work was to be impacted by the change”; a parallel 1971 conference sought “participation at the moment of idea generation” [1].
Co-production in public administration (1970s). After Ostrom and her team published the first work on co-production, interest surged then “died down in the 1980s”, displaced by market-inspired reforms “in which citizens were cast as consumers”, reviving only once those reforms lost academic favour [3].
Value co-creation in marketing (2000s). Prahalad and Ramaswamy “are usually given credit for bringing co-creation to the minds of those in the business community” [1], locating value in the firm–consumer interaction rather than the product [4]. Note the asymmetry: “the best known proponents of co-design originate from business or marketing and not from design practice” [1].
Service-dominant logic (2004–2008). The 2004 premise read “The customer is always a co-producer”; it became “The customer is always a co-creator of value” because the emphasis on “the collaborative nature of value creation” was being “lost in the connotations of ‘production’” [2]. (The 2004 article could not be obtained; its wording is quoted as reproduced in [2].)
III. What distinguishes co-creation
The discriminating feature is joint production of the thing of value, with the party who will use it. Each adjacent term fails one half of that.
A. Against consultation — asking is not co-creating
The sharpest statement predates the term. Arnstein’s ladder places Consultation at rung 4, inside the band labelled “degrees of tokenism”, alongside Informing at rung 3 [5]:
“if consulting them is not combined with other modes of participation, this rung of the ladder is still a sham since it offers no assurance that citizen concerns and ideas will be taken into account.” [5]
Restricted to that level, “participation remains just a window-dressing ritual”; the principle is that “participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless” [5].
B. Against participation and partnership
Co-creation “refers to the active involvement of end-users in various stages of the production process” and is therefore more specific than participation, “which could also refer to passive involvement” [6]. In public services co-creation and co-production “focus on the output-side of the policy cycle”, and differ from government–civil-society partnerships in addressing “(groups of) individual citizens rather than organizations” [3]. Partnership is a separate and higher rung for Arnstein — where citizens “negotiate and engage in trade-offs with traditional power holders”, still below delegated power and citizen control [5].
C. Against co-design — a subset, not a synonym
“By co-design we indicate collective creativity as it is applied across the whole span of a design process… Thus, co-design is a specific instance of co-creation” [1]. It means more than collaboration between designers: it covers “designers and people not trained in design working together” [1].
D. Against co-production — nested, and one of them is optional
Service-dominant logic treats co-production as nested inside co-creation of value, capturing “participation in the development of the core offering itself” [2]. Because value “can not be created unilaterally”, the customer is always a co-creator, whereas co-production “is optional and can vary from none at all to extensive co-production activities” [2]. Public administration reverses this, reserving “co-creation” for initiator or co-design involvement and “co-production” for implementation [6] — the opposite sense.
E. What the strong claim actually asserts
The premise is “intended as a positive statement”, not a normative one [2] — a description of how value works, not advice to involve people. Its consequences: “[t]he enterprise cannot deliver value, but only offer value propositions”, and “[v]alue is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary” [2]. Design research matches this, giving “the person who will eventually be served… the position of ‘expert of his/her experience’” [1].
IV. What the evidence reports
A. Role change is the mechanism, and capability is uneven
In the classical user-centred process “the user is a passive object of study” and the researcher “served as a translator”; in co-design “the roles get mixed up” and the researcher becomes “a facilitator” [1]. Four levels of creativity are distinguished — doing, adapting, making, creating — with the response differing by level: “lead”, “guide”, “provide scaffolds”, “offer a clean slate” [1] — though “[i]t is not always the case that we want to push people beyond their level of interest, passion and creativity” [1].
B. Depth of involvement varies, and shallow is the norm
A systematic review of 122 articles and books (1987–2013), from 4,716 screened records, classified involvement into three types: across 136 coded instances the citizen appeared as co-implementer in 50%, co-designer in 28% and initiator in 9% [6]. The constraint is mostly organisational — compatibility of the organisation with citizen participation was the largest coded factor (46% of 103) against only 30 citizen-side factors, and the remedial actions found “all refer to ‘something that the public organization must do’” [6].
C. Objectives are often unstated, and outcomes are barely studied
In 52% of the 122 studies no objective was mentioned; where stated, the leading ones were effectiveness (18%) and efficiency (11%) [6]. Most studies targeted influential factors or typologies rather than results, and only 20% reported specific outcomes [6]. Negative cases exist — co-production in garbage disposal produced no benefit, and neighbourhood co-production did not directly produce safety — and the review’s conclusion is the honest one: “we cannot definitely conclude whether co-creation/co-production can be considered as beneficial” [6].
V. Scope of adoption
In public services the practice concentrates in health care (30 records) and education (15), and the evidence is predominantly qualitative — 51% single case studies, 34% comparative, 15% quantitative [6]. Interest has “come increasingly onto the agenda of policymakers”, seen as “a possible solution to the public sector’s decreased legitimacy and dwindling resources” [3]. Commercially the term spread to the later stages of product development, becoming “the latest trend in marketing and brand development” [1]. Two bibliographic reviews map the field: one reports two main clusters plus “specific research streams and common themes” [7]; the other notes “the diverse strands that underpin the still emerging concept” — psychotherapy, critical theory, software development and design [8]. Both were read in abstract only.
VI. Limitations
The concept is unstable, and the strong claim is not a theory. Co-creation is characterised as one of the “magic concepts” of public-sector reform [6]; comparing definitions across 122 studies — 19% of which offered none at all — concluded that “empirically co-creation and co-production are used as interchangeable concepts”, which “does not contribute to conceptual clarity” [6]. Service-dominant logic’s authors likewise state that it “is not” a theory but “a mindset, a lens” at the “pre-theoretic, paradigm level” [2].
The practice literature is skewed optimistic. “[T]he terms themselves are skewed towards optimism. ‘Creation’ and ‘production’ are the glittering objectives of economic discourse” [9]. Against this, seven potential harms are named: the deliberate rejection of responsibility, failing accountability, rising transaction costs, loss of democracy, reinforced inequalities, implicit demands and co-destruction — since engagement “can also be a cover for minimizing governments’ responsibilities and accountability”, and “wealthy and highly educated citizens may come to dominate such processes” [9].
A critical tradition treats the concept as a labour transfer. Drawing on Foucault and neo-Marxist value theory, one account argues that “administering consumption in ways that allow for the continuous emergence and exploitation of creative and valuable forms of consumer labor is the true meaning of the concept of co-creation”, invoking a notion of “free labor” that is “simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” [10]. Public-service scholars flag the same concern, treating substitution “of paid professional work by unpaid labour” as posing “questions of exploitation” [9]. Independently of that framing, a descriptive point stands: co-creation moves work across the boundary between production and consumption without necessarily moving payment with it. Relatedly, approaches built on lead users “limit participation… to an elite and very carefully selected group of people” [1].
The critical evidence is itself thin, tending “to pertain to the study of specific cases of co-production, limiting the generalizability of findings” [9] — and the field’s own reviewers warn that treating co-creation as “a virtue in themselves”, valuable even where outcomes “remain unproven”, is “dangerous” [9].
References
[1] E. B.-N. Sanders and P. J. Stappers, “Co-creation and the new landscapes of design,” CoDesign, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 5–18, 2008, doi: 10.1080/15710880701875068.
[2] S. L. Vargo and R. F. Lusch, “Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2008, doi: 10.1007/s11747-007-0069-6.
[3] T. Brandsen, T. Steen, and B. Verschuere, “Co-creation and co-production in public services: Urgent issues in practice and research,” in Co-Production and Co-Creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services, T. Brandsen, T. Steen, and B. Verschuere, Eds. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2018, ch. 1, pp. 3–8.
[4] C. K. Prahalad and V. Ramaswamy, “Co-creation experiences: The next practice in value creation,” Journal of Interactive Marketing, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 5–14, 2004, doi: 10.1002/dir.20015. Abstract only.
[5] S. R. Arnstein, “A ladder of citizen participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 216–224, 1969, doi: 10.1080/01944366908977225. Read via an online reproduction, not the journal text; page numbers are therefore not cited.
[6] W. H. Voorberg, V. J. J. M. Bekkers, and L. G. Tummers, “A systematic review of co-creation and co-production: Embarking on the social innovation journey,” Public Management Review, vol. 17, no. 9, pp. 1333–1357, 2015, doi: 10.1080/14719037.2014.930505.
[7] M. Galvagno and D. Dalli, “Theory of value co-creation: a systematic literature review,” Managing Service Quality, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 643–683, 2014, doi: 10.1108/MSQ-09-2013-0187. Abstract only.
[8] N. Ind and N. Coates, “The meanings of co-creation,” European Business Review, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 86–95, 2013, doi: 10.1108/09555341311287754. Abstract only.
[9] T. Steen, T. Brandsen, and B. Verschuere, “The dark side of co-creation and co-production: seven evils,” in Co-Production and Co-Creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services, T. Brandsen, T. Steen, and B. Verschuere, Eds. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2018, ch. 21, pp. 284–293, doi: 10.4324/9781315204956-45.
[10] D. Zwick, S. K. Bonsu, and A. Darmody, “Putting consumers to work: ‘Co-creation’ and new marketing govern-mentality,” Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 163–196, 2008, doi: 10.1177/1469540508090089. Read via the authors’ accepted manuscript; page numbers not cited.