Designing a model of customers' knowledge co-creation in the insurance industry

Knowledge is a key element in fostering product and service innovation. One of the newest concepts proposed for using knowledge resources outside the organization is the concept of knowledge co-creation. Knowledge co-creation means the processes of voluntary collaboration between customers, researchers and organizational managers to create knowledge about products and services. The most important actor that plays a role in the co-creation of knowledge is the customer. The issue of customer knowledge co-creation is not yet well known in our country's insurance industry, so identifying its components and determining the influence of each of them is one of the challenges of current insurance companies. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the components of customer knowledge co-creation and provide a model of relationships between customer knowledge co-creation components in the country's insurance industry.The present study is a fundamental research based on the purpose and based on the data collection method is a descriptive-survey approach. In order to identify the components of the research, interviews were conducted with 14 experts including insurance industry managers and faculty members who are experts in this field. In order to present the model of component relationships, the standard questionnaire of interpretive structural modelling approach, which is based on pairwise comparisons, was completed by 10 experts. Based on the results of semi-structured interviews with experts, 51 primary codes and 7 categories were extracted, which were classified into 5 levels by interpretive structural modeling approach. In this model, the component of "ICT infrastructure" is at the lowest level, which indicates the highest penetration among other components, which means that the change and development of this component, causes a change and development of other components of the model. Also, the components of "motivating customers" and "building trust", which are at the first level of the model, are the most influential components of the model. Therefore, in order to optimally implement the process of customer knowledge co-creation in insurance companies, strengthening the components of lower levels of the model, which have more influence, should be a priority in management decisions.