A Theory of Co-Production for User Generated Content – Integrating the User into the Content Value Chain

The concept of co-production was originally introduced by political science to explain citizen participation in the provision of public goods. The concept was quickly adopted in business research targeting the question how users could be voluntarily integrated into industrial production settings to improve the development of goods and services on an honorary basis. With the emergence of Social Software and web-based collaborative infrastructures the concept of co-production gains importance as a theoretical framework for the collaborative production of web content and services. Current research in human computation has adopted the concept for the semantic enrichment of web content by collaborative tagging. This article argues that co-production is a powerful concept, which helps to explain the emergence of user generated content and the partial transformation of orthodox business models in the content industries.