Engagement and value cocreation within a multi-stakeholder service ecosystem

While consumer engagement and value cocreation research proliferate, it is important to explore these concepts from an ecosystem-based multi-stakeholder perspective as, therefore, undertaken in this article. Specifically, this study marks a pioneering attempt in conceptualizing stakeholder engagement (SE) as a core foundation of stakeholder value cocreation within multi-stakeholder service ecosystems. SE’s behavioral, cognitive, and emotional dimensions are proposed to activate distinct outcomes, thus disentangling stakeholder value cocreation from the closely related constructs of cooperation and collaboration. The study adopts a qualitative multi-method approach integrating in-depth managerial interviews with observation, and secondary data analysis. The findings show that (1) when behavioral SE prevails, the activated process is cooperation, (2) when cognitive SE is also present, the activated process is collaboration, (3) when emotional SE integrates the behavioral and cognitive SE, the activated process is cocreation.