The Business of Co-creation and the Co-creation of Business

The dissertation explores the business of co-creation and the co-creation of business among organizational members within the field of Danish manufacturing companies. Danish manufacturing companies collaborate and compete in a global environment characterized by relentless change and high ambiguity. In response firms have developed increasingly complex collaborative interdependencies within and among organizations in order to promote continuous innovations and growth. These collaborations call for (and enable) organizational members to engage in ongoing distributed search for co-creative innovations. The dissertation studies this poorly understood process, exploring how people in Danish manufacturing companies co-create new work practices and products in experimental ways. More precisely, the dissertation generates a micro-level understanding of the dynamics of co-creation in modern organizations asking: what and who co-create(s), and how does this operate in contemporary organizational life? It seeks to analyze and understand these firm dynamics of co-creation by focusing on the level of everyday work roles, “communing” and “work organizing practices” that generate a constant sense of belief and doubt thus helping organizational members to redefine existing work practices, learn and improve. Based on qualitative case studies in seven Danish manufacturing companies, the dissertation aims at attaining a nuanced view into how such work organizing practices of belief and doubt are co-created (and of what they co-create) among organizational members by exploring the nature of work roles and communing relationships that enable the co-creation of such work organizing practices and vice versa. By illuminating the inner mechanisms (or relational dynamics) of these work organizing practices and how they allow for human and organizational growth, the study gives content to the notion of the so-called “learning organization” and offers some promising routes towards co-creating such organizational forms. It thus casts light on the Danish transformation process towards new organizational patterns of production, organizing and innovation.