Abstract:    Driven by the intersection trends of information technological changes and shifts in organizational structures and market conditions, co-creation has become a transdisciplinary, fledgling and significant research field. The researchers and practitioners have consistently argued that value co-creation among an enterprise and its primary stakeholders is a growing powerful trend in the current business environment. However, despite an increasing focus on value co-creation, a complete picture of value co-creation research remains little understood in the management and business literature. Thus, a comprehensive and systematic review analysis is needed to inform our understanding of this landscape of value co-creation research. This study reports the results of the literature analysis including the publication information, the research perspectives and a research framework, develops a knowledge system of value co-creation research, and discusses the research limitations and proposes research directions. We believe that this study can lay a foundation for future value co-creation research and practice.
    This study conducts a systematic literature analysis on 493 English articles and 278 Chinese articles published between January 2000 and July 2018 in the management and business fields from the Core Collection database in Web of Science (WOS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure. First, this study employs a statistics tool — SATI for the analysis of extant literature. The key variables: authors, title, source, abstract, keywords and cited articles are imported into SATI to observe the yearly publication information between January 2000 and July 2018, the citations of the sample articles, and the abstract information. The literature analysis generates three key findings. First, we find that the development of value co-creation research falls into three phases: Phase 1 representing a slow knowledge accumulation process in which only a few representative articles emerged; Phase 2 demonstrating as a rapidly developing process with an upward trend in publications; and Phase 3 representing a value co-creation age. With an increasing number of researchers jumping on this research bandwagon of value co-creation, the research in this area has gained new momentum and kept a continually growing tread. Second, drawing on a content analysis of 15 high cited articles, two overarching meta-theoretical foundations for value co-creation research are identified: customer experience and S-D logic. This lens of customer experience stimulates a rich body of studies on this area of value co-creation. Moving beyond the theoretical position, S-D logic serves as an alternative and transcending theoretical foundation for the development of value co-creation theory and practice. In this vein, the service logic perspective surfaced and has evolved into a service ecosystem view. Third, a preliminary taxonomy framework is developed. This framework includes four themes: co-creation pattern, customer experience, co-creation antecedent and consequence.
   Next, through a systematic content analysis, a knowledge system of value co-creation research is developed. All representative, influential and latest articles in major management and business journals are read by the first author of this study to improve the rigor and completeness of content analysis. The insights from typical and latest value co-creation literature are included in the knowledge system as much as possible. Based on the preliminary taxonomy framework, this knowledge system of value co-creation research includes four components: value co-creation patterns and processes, antecedents and impacts of value co-creation, customer co-creation experience. First, given that value co-creation patterns and processes involve the participating actors (who), the channels (where) and the interaction forms and processes (how), our commentary focuses on these three aspects to provide a complete picture of the value co-creation mechanisms. The early studies mainly focus on the dyadic relationship between an enterprise and its customers. With the growing digital economy, the co-creation actors range from enterprises and customers to suppliers, platform operators/owners, sale channels, partners, and independent developers/inventors. These highly distributed and heterogeneous actors interact with each other within online social networks, thus building a network-based service ecosystem. This service ecosystem provides the new institutional logics for the value creation among a multitude of actors. In a service ecosystem, the digital service platform acts as a flexible architecture upon which multiple sets of actors interact with each other to codevelop complementary technologies, products, or services as well as dynamic capabilities. The interactions among actors are characterized as action collections of linking, interacting, resource integrating and restructuring. Second, since customers and core enterprises are the most crucial actors and interactions are the sources of value in the value co-creation process, our study analyzes the antecedents of value co-creation from these three aspects: the customer, the enterprise and the interaction environment. Third, drawing on an extensive literature review, this study summarizes the consequents of value co-creation from the individual, organizational and ecosystem level. Fourth, we review the studies on customer co-creation experience/value from three major aspects: the ways in which it is conceptualized, the levels at which it is analyzed and its roles in the existing co-creation research. A systematic review of the literature reveals that experience determines what is valuable to a customer; experience/value is characterized as contextual, networking, longitudinal, iterative, temporal, dynamic, and interactive; co-creation experience/value plays a notable role in the co-creation research; and almost all research treats co-creation experience/value at an individual-level. Based on a systematic analysis of these four themes, this study presents a complete knowledge system of the value co-creation research. 
    Finally, this study describes research limitations and presents five research directions: (1) to investigate the mechanisms of value co-creation based on new information technologies such as big data, mobile internet and social media; (2) to explore the government of value co-creation in a service ecosystem; (3) to investigate the antecedents of value co-creation from a dynamic perspective of service ecosystem; (3) to explore customer co-creation experience value in the current sociotechnical?environment; (4) to examine the impacts of value co-creation from the balanced perspective of service ecosystem.

Key words: value co-creation, bibliometric, research perspective, knowledge system