Abstract
The purpose of this article is to explore the present status of value co-creation research through conceptual reviews of value co-creation that recently attracts a great deal of attention in the research area on management diagnosis. As a result of reviewing the existing research related to value co-creation, it was revealed that the two distinct concepts of value co-creation (i.e. selective value co-creation and essential value co-creation) have coexisted in what referred as a value co-creation. Moreover, results of the additional reviews on the these two value co-creation concepts with special attention to the perceptions of the roles of customer and learning aspects of value co-creation showed that the essential value co-creation is based on a novel relationship framework exceeding traditional role division of firm-customer relationships and can be conceptualized as a four-dimensional complex communication process. In the last section, some management diagnostic implications of this research were examined.
