Theoretical Model of Value Co-Creation and Sustainability

If sustainable practices were for a long time a differentiation tool on an overcrowded market, the creation of green regulations from governments transformed this competitive advantage into legal compliance, hindering financial outcomes. Based on the existing literature, this study presents a conceptual framework of factors believed to create value when cocreation occurs between organizations and stakeholders in a sustainability context. Four factors appeared to be crucial to create value sustainably-oriented : (1) share of values with stakeholders that go beyond financial interests, which will highly determine their drive to engage. (2) relationship management focused on keeping a coherence with values and objectives while developing stakeholders’ loyalty. (3) knowledge acquisition by using co-creation as a platform where stakeholders will be able to translate their knowledge into action. (4) innovation towards sustainable development. This paper brings a new contribution in the sense that drivers to engage into co-creation for sustainability are not based on financial interests unlike usual co-creation, directly impacting the way the relationship should be approached by firms to learn from their stakeholders and to create value. A gap remaining is the availability of measurement tools to assess value created from co-creation projects.