In the manufacturing industry a trend towards servitization is gaining traction due to the digital transformation, increasing customer expectations, and new competitors entering the market. Products and services are merging into integrated product-service systems, providing a higher added value to the customer. Their development is enabled by an increased cooperation with companies of different sizes and branches within a so-called business ecosystem. The increased technological and organizational interdependencies within this system presents management with challenges. The purpose of this study is to identify a wide set of challenges faced during product-service system development within a business ecosystem in order to develop a framework that helps management to navigate through them by presenting what needs to be designed and giving an idea about how the challenges can be tackled. A specific recommendation for a project within the case company is made.

In order to answer the research questions, a single case study approach has been chosen, cooperating with a German machine manufacturer. A systematic literature search, questionnaires, and several workshops were conducted to identify fields of actions and requirements, evaluate them, develop possibilities to fulfill these requirements, and evaluate these design suggestions.

18 fields of actions with 45 requirements could be identified. For the investigated case at the company, major challenges concerning trust between involved parties, awareness and understanding of the project, IT infrastructure, structures and processes, coordination and orchestration as well as performance measurement could be found. In order to give management design directions for fulfilling all derived requirements, a general management framework was developed consisting of seven design fields, namely, Objectives & Results, Fundamentals, Interconnectedness, Accountability, Enabling, Transparency & Transfer, and Controlling. All of these categories have two to four subcategories specifying the field. For the case at the company, all design fields were concerned. In order to tackle the challenges underlying the requirements, management should focus on goal determination and providing an argumentation for this, establishing common values and rules, integrating the actors to coordinate together, building up an identity and communicating achievements in the business ecosystem, determine responsibilities on all sides, and monitor the performance of the undertaking.

In conclusion, the developed framework can be used for novel and current projects, enabling management to take action on the specific designed fields that have not yet reached maturity, ensuring the fulfillment of all requirements. Future research might be devoted to a simpler and enhanced relation of the requirements as a maturity measurement and the fields of the framework as a navigator. Studies should be carried out to confirm and enlarge the derived design possibilities qualitatively and quantitatively with a bigger sample.