Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand and analyze the contextualization of value co-creation in the endogenous context. Analyzing how the five activities of value co-creation process are contextualized in a specific context can provide a better and deeper understanding for co-creating value with endogenous social and cultural values and norms. In this paper, value co-creation is contextualized in the public transport context from the Chinese perspective.

Methodology/approach – This paper adopts a qualitative approach to analyze and understand the contextualization of value co-creation in endogenous context, using multiple case studies of the public transport from China: Zhengzhou and Chengdu public transport services. Discussing the contextualization of value co-creation process with the five activities, i.e. customer engagement, self-service, customer experience, problem-solving, and co-designing, allows us to explain and understand value co-creation in the Chinese endogenous context.

Findings – This paper illustrates that contextualization of value co-creation in the endogenous context contributes to service business development. In this paper the five activities of value co-creation is integrating the concepts of value-in-social-context and value-in-cultural-context in different specific contexts, with endogenous social and cultural norms and values. This paper reveals the importance of contextualizing value co-creation process and the significant impacts of endogenous social and cultural issues in specific context, for better, easier, and more effective value co-creation.

Originality/value – This paper makes original contributions to the ongoing discussion in service research, especially service-dominant logic (S-D logic) in endogenous thinking and the concepts of value-in-social-context and value-in-cultural-context. In service research, the main theoretical challenges are understanding and integrating endogenous thinking in specific contexts, which contextualize and better co-create value by focusing social and cultural issues. This paper reveals the adoption of endogenous thinking in the service research.

Research limitation –The qualitative research design of multiple case studies does not enable empirical generalizations to be made. Future research in this area should focus on generalizing the present findings by studying the endogenous thinking in contextualization of value co-creation, in other empirical settings.