Value co-creation management: aspects of students’ involvement at Ukrainian universities

Abstract

Value co-creation is a modern marketing and management approach that implies customer involvement in the process of generating values. The purpose of the paper is to identify the main directions of such cooperation in Ukrainian higher education. Value co-creation is defined as the holistic process of collaboration between the university management team, teachers and students, aimed at generating value for all stakeholders. Pros and cons of different co-creation activities are discussed, namely mass-customization, coproduction, co-marketing, UGC, student government, and co-management. Being a complex issue, value co-creation management is facing additional challenges in higher education. Low qualification of student participants, top-down initiative, systematic crisis of university education, and conflict of interests are all adding to the uncertainty of the effectiveness of this approach in the Ukrainian realities. The author discusses the perspective of further implementation of value co-creation management to increase university competitiveness and to gain a strategic advantage.

Keywords

• value co-creation
• service-dominant (s-d) logic
• university management
• standardized value
• personalized value
• co-management
• education commercialization