Value co-creation: The black box, opened · a Latenta interactive demo

Study 1 · The hero exhibit⬛ The Black Box — the model, opened

The literature called the value creation process a "black box" (Grönroos, 2011; Leroy et al., 2013) — inputs known, outputs known, mechanics dark. Twenty-nine depth interviews opened it. Hover / tap every element and every line; click anything for its evidence.

Fidelity note. This is the thesis's Figure 3 (p. 152), redrawn faithfully: 34 elements, 31 links, the same solid-vs-dashed grammar, the same ⊕ and ○ connectors — every one carrying its own plain-English explainer. Positions re-flow on small screens; the topology never changes.

The anatomy, experienced🚶 Walk an Episode

Pick a scenario and walk the five phases yourself — watch which resources engage, where the loops fire, and exactly where value-in-exchange does (or doesn't) appear. The narration is an illustrative device; the structure it walks is the empirical model, and every phase card cites real study quotes.

The evidence, verbatim🎙 The Voices

The customers' own words — verbatim excerpts from the thesis, anonymised X1–X29, each tagged to its place in the model. Every quote on this page byte-matches the thesis; nothing is trimmed to improve it.

What the episode runs on🧰 The Resource Rack

Six resource types decide the episode — and the supplier fully controls exactly one of them. The rest it can only influence by entering the customer's process. Re-sort by who controls each chip.

Access: OW/FA vs EX — where money enters

Resources are either in ownership / freely accessed (OW/FA) or require market exchange (EX). The distinction is where the study pins the difference between value-in-exchange and value-in-use: value-in-exchange emerges only when the EX gate opens — during resource selection, when something must be bought or rented. Episodes run entirely on owned and free resources never touch the market at all — and still end in value.

Non-linearity, given its own stage🔁 The Loops

Customers loop back: re-select after adjusting, re-adjust after shooting, restart everything after judging. A straight-line customer journey is a fiction the data politely declines. Click a return arrow for its evidence.

Textbook vs observed

The textbook journey runs 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 and goes home. The observed episode doubles back: X18 walks the wedding shoes out of the frame (adjustment → selection), X13 re-shoots on every setting (integration → adjustment), X12's horrible Zeniths restart the whole thing (evaluation → initiation). The loops aren't failure — they are the process.

The anatomy of value-in-use⚖️ Benefits − Sacrifices

What comes out of the box, dissected: three kinds of benefit, minus what it cost. Across 489 coded nodes, nothing outside these four emerged.

RQ1, answered: value-in-use includes what it costs you. The data put sacrifice inside the definition — a direct amendment to SDL/SL's benefits-only view. The customer's verdict is a mix of benefits and sacrifices, weighed together in the evaluation phase.

The bridge teaser. Three years and two markets later, the quantitative phase measured how weakly sacrifice correlates with perceived value (r ≈ 0.08) — the "Sacrifice Paradox" in the Value Co-Creation Engine demo. The seed of that finding is on this page, in the customers' own words: sacrifices are real, endured — and, tellingly, often narrated as worth it.

The finding with the commercial tail🪞 The Role Mirror

Theory said every customer is a value co-creator (SDL, FP6). The customers disagreed — they place themselves along a continuum: recipients, co-creators, creators. Drag the marker; meet the three anchor witnesses.

Why this matters commercially. Self-perceived role shapes what customers expect from you: recipients want it done for them, creators want to be equipped, co-creators want a partner. The quantitative phase later took this up as a measurable segmentation criterion — value creation awareness. No competitor is segmenting on this.

Value activity without consumption🌐 The Sphere of Consumption Interest

Talking, reading, sharing, testing, forum life — customers live in the topic for years without a single transaction. This is where communities, content and trial belong in the model: real value activity, outside the episode. Hover the orbits.

Episodic learning📈 The Flywheel

Between episodes, something compounds: every usage episode grows the customer's knowledge, skills and experience — which re-enter the resource pool and raise the next episode's ceiling. Customer success is the business of manufacturing better value creators.

Under the hood🔬 The Rigour Room

The credibility bedrock of the exploratory phase: who was interviewed, how they were chosen, how the words became a model — and the pilot story that made the whole instrument better. Every method term explains itself on hover.

Every question, with its reasons📋 The Interview Schedule

All 20 interview questions with their prompts, documented rationales and research-question mapping (thesis Table 15) — the instrument, in full, shipping day one. Question wordings verbatim; rationales abridged from the table.

Methodology & the guided close📖 From Exploration to Proof

Study 1 opened the box. Everything after tested what it found — at scale, twice.

The research questions

Study 1 · this demo29 depth interviews → thematic analysis in NVivo 10 → the five-phase anatomy of value creation, the resource taxonomies, the role continuum, and value-in-use redefined to include sacrifice.

Study 2 · instrumentsItem generation from the qualitative findings → expert face & content validity → refined multi-item scales and indexes.

Study 3–4 · verificationEFA, then CFA (LISREL): 15 measurement models confirmed sound, reflective and formative.

PLS-SEM · the proofTwo path models — customer's independent value creation and value co-creation — tested on US and UK samples, explaining ≈57% of variance in value-in-use.

Honest limitations

· Exploration, not generalisation: 29 purposively selected informants illuminate mechanisms; the quantitative studies carried the burden of proof.

· One consumption context (digital camera usage) served as the scene; the model's constructs travelled into the quantitative phase, and claims beyond the context were re-estimated there.

· Researcher-led coding, with supervisor inspection across 12 iterations as the credibility practice.

· The NVivo node tree (489 nodes / 12 mother nodes) is architecture on this page, not per-theme counts — counts render only if the NVivo export is supplied. Nothing here is invented.

Where the method travels

Wherever customers use their way to value rather than merely receiving it:

Consumer electronicsSoftware & SaaSSports & outdoorDIY & toolsMusical instrumentsKitchen & appliancesVehiclesCreative servicesFitness & wellbeingLearning productsFinancial tools

This is where measurement starts. Before you fund features, discounts or journeys, watch how your customers actually manufacture value with your product — phase by phase, in their own words. Study 1 built the model; the quantitative engine proved it across two markets. Open the sequel: the Value Co-Creation Engine →