Sustainable Value Co-Creation

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Sustainability deals with the concept of value co-creation, with the aim to merge aspects of sustainability and sustainable approach with co-creative practices, in relation to business competitiveness in markets.
Sustainability seems to be a hot topic today and is undergoing a paradigmatic transformation. This affects many fields and sectors, revealing the significant implications for actors’ participation, even in markets.
Today, value and value co-creation are very hot topics too in many scholars’ communities worldwide (especially in service research communities), helping companies to understand how to compete in the evolving modern reality in which they operate, particurarly by changing and modifying their boundaries and constraints.
What about a merge? Recently, some authors have addressed the new concept of sustainable value co-creation (for example, for customization, business networks, social responsibility, B2B relationships, and so on); likewise, a number of relevant advances have been diffused concerning the participation of the involved actors as a consequence of the use (value-in-use) as well as the contingent integration of resources in a specified context (value-in-context) and issues of co-design, co-production, co-marketing, co-delivery, etc.. Nevertheless, other things can be explored regarding sustainability and their main principles.
Indeed, value is something emergent, subjective, dynamic that calls for actions to be performed over time, thus including sustainability aspects. Furthermore, value co-creation relates to the experience, customer behaviors, servicescapes, system interactions, resource integration, multi-part active participation, and other factors that affect economy, society, and environment. In such a way, sustainable value co-creation could be linked with issues regarding eco-systems, service systems, complex adaptive systems, smartness, emergence, complexity, viability, market shaping, and deserves to be more investigated.
We invite researchers and practitioners to send their papers on sustainable value co-creation in order to contribute to the growth of this crucial topic. Studies on all related disciplines are welcome, including economics, marketing, law, design, social sciences, computer science, organization theory, engineering, operation research, management, and so on.
This Special Issue offers the opportunity to publish on a state-of-the-art topic, promoting wide diffusion, recognition and citations of the presented papers. In addition, many other benefits will be provided, such as support from the editors, feedback and tips to improve a paper, peer endorsement of the published works, and membership in an elite group of contributors with outstanding networking opportunities.

Topics

This call for papers seeks foundation-building research on sustainable value co-creation for business competitiveness that explores value culture, sustainable approaches to the generation of value, co-creative involvement, engagement and self-engagement of actors in terms of concepts, models, operations, strategies, organizations, management, with the aim to collect contributions from several scientific domains and backgrounds. Therefore, interdisciplinary works as well as industry–academia joint research efforts are especially welcome.

We seek high-quality, original contributions on the following topics:

Value in business competitiveness

• Value culture in business
• Value emergence for business competitiveness
• Value in competitive and Smart Service Systems
• Value in innovation, innovation in value generation
• Sustainable generation process of value

Advances in value co-creation

• Evolution of research on value co-creation
• Multi-disciplinary analysis of value co-creation
• Service management and marketing in value co-creation
• Value co-creation in eco-systems and/or complex adaptive systems
• Market shaping based on the co-creation of value

Sustainability and value co-creation

• Users’ involvement and engagement in sustainable value co-creation
• Self-organization and re-configuration in sustainable value co-creation
• Viability and complexity in sustainable value co-creation
• IT solutions enabling sustainability of value co-creation
• Service design for sustainable co-creation

Ecosystems, sustainable value co-creation, and innovation

• Ecosystems, institutions, and institutional complexity for sustainable innovation and social innovation, social sustainability
• Institutions, shared norms, beliefs, and ethics value for social, economic, and environmental growth
• Institutionalization and market and ecosystems emergence
• Institutional arrangement, governance, and policy-making in sustainable value co-creation and innovation
• Resource integration, shared intention for sustainable value co-creation
• Big data and information to foster market evolution and sustainable innovation
• Strategic planning for sustainable value co-creation and innovation

Prof. Francesco Polese
Dr. Luca Carrubbo
Dr. Orlando Troisi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.