Abstract

The theoretical understanding of marketing is nowadays focusing extensively on value co-creation and stakeholder relationships. However, despite the growing interest, still little is known about how value is co-created in multi-stakeholder settings. This paper explores how stakeholder engagement contributes to value co-creation and which engagement mechanisms help such process in service delivery. Starting from a review of the relevant literature a qualitative analytical framework is developed and used to analyze six cases of multi-stakeholder interaction. Findings show that promoting accessibility in terms of process inclusiveness and openness allows to enhance value co-creation. Results are relevant from an academic perspective, since they shed a new light on a fundamental phenomenon in a given empirical setting such as public service, and for practice, since they provide decision makers with insights about how to approach stakeholder engagement in order to enhance its value creation effects.