Foreword

The role of customer participation has been widely recognized to generate new knowledge for suppliers, but the dark side of customer participation has not captured enough attention.For instance, customer participation may bring complexity and uncertainty during co-creation process.However, most of prior studies had taken customer participation as an aggregation, which was not enough to make full understanding of it.In order to bridge the gap, this book explores how to manage customer participation to come to mutual understanding based on service dominant logic view, knowledge-based view and information processing view. This book mainly contributes in the following areas:

First, this book divides customer participation into participation depth and breadth to explore co-creation process, which may provide insights to solve the inconsistent views of the effects of customer participation.While prior research to take customer participation as an aggregation may lose fruitful insights and also leads to conflicting views.

Second, in order to explore how to effectively manage customer participation, this book introduces supplier team knowledge to solve the problem. Our main focus is on how to match supplier team knowledge structure and different customer participation forms to facilitate co-creation process and maximize co-creation value based on information processing theory.Here supplier team knowledge is able to be manipulated, which is a good complementary to prior literature that mainly stressed the contingent factors of environmental characteristics.

Third, this book explores co-creation outcomes from customer and supplier side: customization（customer value）, and application expansion（suppliers value）. Existing studies of collaboration mostly investigated the outcomes from supplier side, while the value of customer is the focus service-dominant logic. Further, most of the prior learning literature focused on the project itself, this study expands the knowledge value acquired from the customer to other projects and other customers.

The unit of analysis was project. We first conducted interview with 16 customer and 16 supplier proj ect managers, and then distributed questionaires to customers and the supplier managers. 136 matched data finally were collected. Hirachical regression analysis was used to test the fit between customer participation and supplier knowledge, and the mediating role of customization between long-term collaboration orientation and application expansion.

First, customer participation and co-development: ①breadth match（customer participation breadth and supplier team knowledge diversity）has positive effect on long-term collaboration orientation; ② depth match（customer participation depth and supplier team knowledge specification）enhances long-term collab-oration orientation; ③breadth mismatch（customer participation breadth and supplier team knowledge specification）prevents long-term collaboration orientation;④depth mismatch（customer participation depth and supplier team knowledge diversity）has no effecton long-term collaboration orientation.

Second, long-term collaboration orientation enhances the value of customization and application diffusion.

Third, customization mediates the relationship between application expansion and long-term collaboration orientation.