How Cross-cultural Issues Impact Co-creation in B2B Relationship

Abstract

While many researches focus on the positive output of co-creation, researchers often fail to consider the what can impact co-creation process and what causes co-creation not to produce the desired outcome. Due to globalization, many firms have to work with other firms cross-border to co-create new product and/or services. Therefore, it is important to investigate how cross-cultural issues impact cocreation in B2B relationship. In this scope of research, individualist/collectivist and power distance from Hofstede’s model are used as the theoretical background to explore how cross-culture issues impact cocreation relationship between Asian and European firms. Since there is no previous research about this topic, our research approach is an exploratory, qualitative research. The empirical data emerges from 12 semi-structured one-on-one interviews conducted with 5 European and 7 Asian who are from 12 different organizations operating in various countries in Asian and Europe. The result of this study identified that cross-culture issues can have positive impact on co-creation, reduce the co-creation efficiency, lead to antecedents of co-destruction and cause co-destruction.