Neural Networks to model the innovativeness perception of co-creative firms

Value co-creation is an emerging business, marketing and innovation paradigm describing the firms aptitude to adopt practices enabling their customers to become active participants in the design and development of personalised products, services and experiences. The main objective of our contribution is to make a quantitative analysis in order to assess the relationship between value co-creation and innovation in technology-driven firms: we are using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to investigate the relationship between value co-creation and innovativeness, and Self Organising Map (SOM) models to cluster firms in terms of their degree of involvement in co-creation and innovativeness. Results from the ANN show that a strong relationship exists between value co-creation and innovativeness; furthermore, SOM are well performing in identifying cluster of firms that are more involved in co-creation values. Our work makes a methodological contribution by adopting and validating a combination of techniques that is able to address complexity and emergence in value co-creation systems.