Value co-creation practices and capabilities: Sustained purposeful engagement across B2B systems

•Sustained purposeful engagement is proposed as a mechanism for value co-creation.•The mechanism connects actors' capabilities and practices.•Co-creative practices include linking, materializing and institutionalizing.•Authors describe capabilities underpinning the realization of co-creative practices.

The paradigm of value co-creation in business markets is now well established in the marketing literature. However, the practices and capabilities for collaborative value co-creation are less understood, particularly in increasingly boundary-less interorganizational, network and ecosystem relationships. This paper describes sets of practices that organizations in business markets adopt to co-create value. We provide a theoretically-grounded, empirically-informed classification of value co-creating practices, identifying the underlying capabilities needed to realize value in B2B systems. We adopt a case study approach utilizing various methods of data collection to explore co-creation practices from four organizations. The analysis reveals that ‘sustained purposeful engagement’ underpins the organizations' ability to co-create and capture value. Implications for organizations willing to develop co-creation capabilities and practices are discussed.