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The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has facilitated consumers’ involvement in firms’ value creation processes through increasingly near real-time information exchanges. This strategic opportunity configures new forms of ICT-enabled collaboration between firms and consumers. Firms can now immediately react to consumers’ requests/complaints, having gained real-time visibility of consumers’ actions and behaviors. Despite the increasing deployment of ICT-enabled value co-creation projects, managers still poorly apprehend them as high-potential strategic initiatives.

This paper investigates this gap through a multiple qualitative case study based on 17 organizations that successfully implement ICT-based value co-creation initiatives, including Lego, Netflix and Blablacar.

This study identifies two dimensions of the ICTs’ value co-creation process, namely, the firms’ involvement and customers’ role, in this co-creation process. Through these dimensions, four ICT-based co-creation initiatives are observed and defined: community, customers’ contributions create the firms’ value proposition (FVP); customization, customers’ service consumption personalize FVP; reputation, customers’ contributions about the offered services completes the FVP; and sense, an algorithmic approach, designed to focus on learning from customers’ consumption tailors FVP.

This study advances a framework supporting managerial decision-making concerning the aptitude of co-creation initiatives to meet organizational goals. Managers may gain insight from its use especially in assessing emerging opportunities to engage consumers in the value creation process.

This chapter examines how proponents of industrialization used multiple modes of communication to socially construct the rational myth of industrialization in the French construction sector after World War II. We illuminate the respective roles of visual and verbal communication in this process. Our findings suggest that actors construct rational myths according to the following step-by-step method: first, they use visuals to suggest associations between new practices and valuable purposes; then they use verbal text to establish the technical rationality of certain practices; and lastly, they employ both verbal and visual communications to convey their mythical features.

This chapter examines the role of multimodal rhetoric in processes of theorization. Empirically, we investigated the theorization process of a highly disruptive innovation in the history of architecture: reinforced concrete. Relying on archival data from a prominent French architectural journal in the period from 1885 to 1939, we studied the rhetorical modes at play in the theorization of reinforced concrete. First, we found that theorization entailed two recursive activities: dramatization and evaluation. While dramatization relies on both verbal and visual (i.e., multimodal) means, evaluation relies on verbal means. We integrated these components into a dynamic model of theorization that explains how visual discourse contributes to theorization beyond the effects of verbal discourse.

This study explores how organizations deal with divergent institutional logics when designing new products. Specifically, we investigate how organizations approach and embody institutional complexity in their product design. Through a multimodal study of serious games, we identify two design strategies, the proximity and the amplification strategies, which organizations employ to balance multiple institutional logics and design novel products that meet competing institutional expectations. Our study makes an important theoretical contribution by showing how institutional complexity can be a source of innovation. We also make a methodological contribution by developing a new, multimodal research design that allows for the in-depth study of organizational artifacts. Altogether, we complement our understanding of how institutional complexity is substantiated in organizational artifacts and highlight the role that multimodality plays in analyzing such situations.