Designing a Service Innovation Model Based on Customer Value Co-creation in the Hospitality Industry

Innovation is an important factor influencing customers' desire to co-create value. Innovation can stimulate the motive and interest of organizations (here hotels) to co-create value with their customers. Hence, innovation is an antecedent variable affecting customers' desire to co-create service experiences. The present research is to design a service innovation model based on customer value co-creation in the hospitality industry of Iran.
 
The present research is a fundamental and exploratory one. To collect data, a semi-structured in-depth interview was used along with library studies. The population of the research included those active in the hospitality service, marketing experts, and academic professors. To choose the experts, the snowball sampling method was applied. The selected 14 experts were interviewed according to the data adequacy.
 
Analyzing the interviews, final codes were extracted including 87 concepts and 29 main items. Finally, using the systematic approach in the data-based theory, the identified codes were classified into six core classifications including central phenomenon, causal conditions, contextual conditions, intervening conditions, strategies, and consequences.
 
 
The results identified the causal items as the development of online communication infrastructures, the adaptation of hotel processes and services to the customer tastes and needs, open innovation, and competition dynamism. The central items included obtaining productive knowledge, customer perception of superior services, visualization of customer experience, customer suggestions for improvement, verbal advertisement, customer-to-customer interaction, customer interaction with the service provider, and customer interaction with the physical and social service environment. The strategic items included launching a customer club, service innovativeness, market orientation, and development of interaction with customers. The contextual items included hotel structure, communication structure, cultural capital, and team orientation. The intervening items included political factors, social-cultural factors, economic factors, management barriers, and lack of support by government and public institutions. The consequential items included improvement of service quality, reduction of expenses and increase in incomes, customer retention, and service development. Hence, special attention must be given to these items to succeed in the service innovation based on customer value co-creation.