Co-creation and learning styles: holy grail or fail? An explorative study to assess whether a relationship between co-creation and learning styles exists.

Abstract

Co-creation is hot. Customers want to be involved in the product-development process and no longer just be users. An example of co-creation is the flavour competition of Lay's where customers can invent new flavours. In this master dissertation it's examined whether a relationship exists between someone's preferred learning style and co-creative environments. A learning style explains how people learn, for example via images or via text. A co-creative environment is the place where co-creation takes place. Lay's used a website for their competition. Next to the existence of a relationship between learning styles and co-creative environments, this study also looks at when these two are matched whether this has a positive influence on the co-creation experience. This is tested via a questionnaire that 135 people completed. Two hypothesis are discussed. The first one looks at the link between learning styles and co-creative environments. The second one focusses on the relation between learning style based co-creative environments and the co-creation experience. The results, analysed via ANOVA and paired t-tests, show that neither of the hypotheses can be confirmed. So based on the results found there isn't a relation between learning styles and co-creative environments or the co-creation experience. So when developing co-creative environments it's better to look at other factors and not take into account someone's learning style. The results also showed that forums should be avoided.