Are knowledge intensive business services really co-produced? Overcoming lack of customer participation in KIBS

• Providers adopt three strategies to compensate for limited customer participation in KIBS delivery processes.
• The strategies are customer education, preventive and problem-management and are enabled by the expertise of KIBS employees.
• Customer education requires more interaction with customers than the other two types of strategies.
• The three strategies are used in a complementary way, depending on customers' ability and willingness to participate.
• Despite the heterogeneity in customers' participation levels, providers' strategies enable the delivery of effective KIBS.

Customer participation is considered necessary for the delivery of effective Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS). However, for different reasons, KIBS customers are not always able to participate actively during the delivery process and providers have to compensate for this in order to deliver effective solutions. We conducted case-based research to understand how KIBS providers do this. The three cases studied suggest that, besides customer education, providers use preventive and problem-management strategies to counterbalance limited customer participation. These three strategies are used in a complementary way and are enabled by the expertise of KIBS providers. They also contribute to the delivery of effective KIBS. The research outcomes refine the existing knowledge of customer participation in KIBS, which has so far focused mainly on the causes and consequences of it and overlooked other related issues. Our results also suggest that practitioners could use the level of customers' ability and willingness to participate as segmentation criteria and then define their strategies and allocate their resources accordingly.