Abstract
In a nutshell, co-creation is described as a way to open up a company to the outside world, helping to generate product innovations and to update brand meanings. Drawing on the online community and co-creation literature, this paper aims at contributing to exploring the main intra-organizational challenges of online customer co-creation for innovation, from the viewpoint of middle managers. The intent is to broaden the existing conceptual understanding of the main internal factors hindering customer co-creation but also of the practices that could be adopted to best manage the related challenges. 
 
 The study adopts a qualitative approach and is based on the results of eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with digital and marketing managers, working closely with co-creation initiatives in the Italian food industry, with the aim of exploring intra-organizational challenges perceived by those who are directly involved in co-creation implementation.
 
 The results complement existing literature by 1) offering a more longitudinal vision of the implementation process—and the related internal hurdles, 2) identifying the most appropriate coping strategies and 3) formulating some hypothesis that could support an interpretative model of the capabilities needed to start the process and managing it in a strategic perspective.
Highlights
Considered as a product-taker, the consumer growingly assumes, in the current competitive landscape, the role of value co-creator (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000, 2004; Hatch & Schultz, 2010; Ind, Iglesias, & Schultz, 2013)
The study adopts a qualitative approach and is based on the results of eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with digital and marketing managers, working closely with co-creation initiatives in the Italian food industry, with the aim of exploring intra-organizational challenges perceived by those who are directly involved in co-creation implementation
This paper adopts a middle managers’ perspective and is aimed to assess organizational challenges of business-to-consumer online co-creation for innovation, meaning innovation in a broad sense, which does not refer to its hard, technological dimension
Summary
Considered as a product-taker (the “target” of the marketing actions put in place by the company), the consumer growingly assumes, in the current competitive landscape, the role of value co-creator (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000, 2004; Hatch & Schultz, 2010; Ind, Iglesias, & Schultz, 2013). Vol 13, No 1; 2021 and in improving the functional and technological content of the offer), and to the soft one, which finds expression in the creation of new cultural meanings (Borghini & Carù, 2008), that can lead to an increase in emotional, symbolic and experiential dimensions of value This “semantic” innovation (Dell’Era, Marchesi, & Verganti, 2010) is pivotal in the food industry, where low amounts of capital are invested in R&D, compared to other industries, and companies are still engaged in developing all kinds of innovations needed to keep up with continuously changing consumer preferences (Ciliberti, Carraresi, & Bröring, 2017). In this context—where true innovation is limited and the lack of meaningful differentiation results in approximately 60%−80% of new food products failing in the market place (Martinez, 2014)—starting a collaboration with consumers, listening to their suggestions, encouraging the reciprocal sharing of knowledge, creativity and ideas (related to new products or, more to new food recipes or new product messages) could offer food companies the opportunity to better assess the needs and preferences of their consumer base, to better (re)define brand meanings and to develop superior value propositions, more relevant to their target (Kemp, 2013)
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