Value Co-creation in Publishing Cultural Creatives: Evolutionary Stages, Stakeholder Capital Logic, and Collaborative Path Design

At the intersection of the digital wave and the experience economy, this article argues that publishing cultural creatives have become a new growth pole for cultural consumption, while traditional one-way value-output models constrain the co-creation potential of diverse stakeholders. Methodologically, the paper combines online survey with case analyses and uses these inputs to construct an evolutionary narrative and a stakeholder-mechanism model. The analysis first traces the developmental trajectory of publishing cultural creatives across stages and then translates stage change into mechanism change. It further conceptualizes value co-creation as a dynamic, multi-stakeholder process characterized by diversified coordination and iterative evolution among publishing institutions, creators, platforms, and users. This co-creation progress is explicitly organized into a four-stage process: value discovery, value development, value realization, and value enhancement. The structure functions as an analytic scaffold through which the paper interprets how cultural value is identified, converted into products and services, realized in market interaction, and then amplified through continued collaboration and social dissemination. The paper's findings specify differentiated roles among stakeholders through a "capital logic." Publishing institutions are described as possessing cultural capital and symbolic capital and as taking a leading role in co-creation organization, thereby providing legitimacy, narrative resources, and institutional continuity. Creators, by contrast, are framed as activating the cultural capital accumulated by publishing institutions through individual or team creativity; in doing so, they inject "creative capital" into co-creation and continuously renew the meaning and attractiveness of cultural creative outputs. Platform enterprises are portrayed as leveraging data capital and technological capital and as acting as intermediaries, creativity triggers, and topic amplifiers. In this role configuration, platforms connect products with audiences, enlarge visibility, and accelerate iteration by enabling feedback and dissemination. Users are described as shifting from passive consumers to active participants; their engagement constitutes a co-creation force that supports iterative evolution of products and the continuing "fission" of cultural value. On the basis of these role descriptions, the paper identifies a collaborative development pathway summarized as "differentiated positioning — creative symbiosis — cross-boundary integration — technology enablement — user participation." The logic of this pathway is incentive and mechanism alignment: collaboration becomes sustainable when positioning clarifies who serves whom, when creative symbiosis stabilizes long-term cooperation, when cross-boundary integration expands scenarios for cultural value realization, when technology enablement supports scalable operation, and when user participation converts cultural resonance into sustained social and market value. The article concludes by positioning value co-creation as an actionable mechanism for supporting sustainable development in publishing, with stakeholder collaboration and iterative evolution functioning as the internal drivers.