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In today’s complex and interconnected marketplace, the study of services and service innovation among multiple actors is an underdeveloped, but a theoretically and managerially relevant research area for enabling value cocreation. Building on general practice theory, the scarce prior service research that has drawn on practice theory, and an empirical study of the Swedish music market, this paper outlines a framework that conceptualizes services and service innovation among multiple actors by focusing on value cocreation practices (VCPs). The framework contributes to service research by conceptualizing services as bundles of VCPs, providing a theoretical foundation for the research that studies services as activities. It also contributes to service research by conceptualizing service innovation as the creation of VCPs. The paper shows how actors’ concrete activities, in combination with the valancing of VCPs existing in the market, induce service innovation. A future agenda for research on services and service innovation is also proposed. In addition to these theoretical contributions, the paper offers practical insights into how managers, with the help of the framework, may broaden their focus to include the shared VCPs of the markets to secure a competitive advantage.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the differences between proactive and reactive market research techniques during the development of new market offerings. The study focused on the financial and innovative performance of traditional market research techniques, such as focus groups and in‐depth interviews, in comparison to more co‐creation‐oriented techniques that are designed to capture customers' value‐in‐use.Design/methodology/approachThe study was a two‐stage process. Study I, an empirical investigation of 195 development projects in European companies, examined how these companies use different market research techniques and how this relates to the profit margins of new products and services. Study II designed an experiment with 50 users of a consumer good and evaluated the contribution of different market research techniques, based on the degree of originality and customer value.FindingsSignificant differences were found, in terms of both content and originality, between the technique based on customer co‐creation and the two traditional market research techniques (Study II). These findings can help to explain why the relationship between the use of market research techniques and profit margin (Study I) is stronger for co‐creation techniques than it is for traditional market research techniques.Originality/valueDespite empirical evidence that the application of market research techniques based on co‐creation can lead to original ideas, there is a lack of valid studies regarding how co‐creation techniques perform in relation to more traditional methods of collaboration with customers.