Understanding customer co-creation activities in higher education: Groupings, characteristics and implications

Co-creation activities describe customers’ involvement or participation in creating value through interaction with a provider. Enhanced customer co-creation can increase customer value. This study aims to determine groupings of customers based on their co-creation activities and to identify characteristics of the groups. De-fining the groups should help in identifying ways of enhancing customer co-creation activities. This study uses higher education services as the study context. It involves students in master’s degree programs at 18 universities in Indonesia. The sample selection was performed by two-stage sampling, in which the sample was 255 students from 9 private universities and 253 students from 9 public universities. The statistical meth-ods used in this study were factor analysis and cluster analysis. Based on the results, five factors determine students’ co-creation activities: information finding, responsible behavior, feedback, helping, and tolerance. Another finding revealed three student groups based on their co-creation activities: higher-level co-creator, irregular co-creator, and lower-level co-creator.