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Coproduction and Innovation in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services
This paper focuses on coproduction of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and the impact it causes on their innovation activity. Coproduction refers to the customer engagement in one or more stages of the services production process. Although coproduction and value co-creation are close concepts and very often are used interchangeably, significant differences between these concepts exist as the latter covers a wider range of provider-client interaction during consumption and usage stages. While value co-creation is related to the development of the customer experience, coproduction is devoted to the creation of the service offering itself. According to the service-dominant logic, which is the most common framework in this field, customer is always a co-creator of value, while his involvement in coproduction is optional. This paper aims at studying whether those KIBS that involve their customers in coproduction are more innovative. The research model includes a set of innovation drivers like human capital, advertising expenditures, the existence of multiregional branch network and standardization as well as the coproduction measure. This model was empirically tested using a dataset of 441 KIBS enterprises in Russia. The results show that coproduction have a strong positive effect on the implementation of both technological and non-technological innovations in KIBS. It means that innovation-oriented KIBS may benefit from developing coproduction-based strategies. These findings contribute to both innovation management and KIBS studies and provide opportunities for future research in both fields