Innovating with customers online: A comparative study of European customers’ motives to co-create

Online co-creation is popular due to the easy interaction with large numbers of customers on a global scale; increasingly, online customers are willing to spend time and effort on business innovation processes as a way to influence the development of products and services. Finding and attracting the innovation-minded potential co-creation partners is one of the main challenges of co-creation trajectories; understanding the attitudes and motives of innovation-minded customers is important in order to entice and recruit them as innovation partners. In a survey conducted in the Netherlands and Spain, we examined customers’ motives for participating in online co-creation processes. Two co-creator profiles were identified based on high and low degrees of motivation. We found that between twenty-five and thirty percent of on line customers are active co-creators and that Spanish customers are more enthusiastic co-creators than Dutch customers. Financial motivations are not the main reason for co-creation; the main motivations for highly motivated customers are product-related benefits, while hedonic benefits are the most important triggers for less motivated co-creators.