Client involvement and innovation in Creative-Intensive Business Services: a framework for exploring co-innovation in advertising agency-client relationships

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understand clients' involvement in innovation processes in creative-intensive business services, namely advertising services. Research shows that agency-client relationships are critical to campaign creativity, customer satisfaction and agency performance, but little evidence exists on collaboration with clients for agency's innovation. In order to fill this gap, a framework is developed for the analysis of agency-client co-innovation by integrating studies on customer involvement, service innovation and relationship marketing. This is followed by an exploratory case study of an Italian successful agency aimed at refining the conceptual framework based on field insights. The analysis provides initial interesting insights for the understanding and further investigation of clients' role and involvement in agencies' innovation processes.