Intra-firm and inter-firm challenges in servitization ecosystem: Experiences from five product-centric firms in different industries
2019 (English)In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED, Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 3071-3080Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the challenges in the servitization journey of product-centric firms from an ecosystem perspective, considering both intra-firm and inter-firm levels. Prior research addresses the challenges of servitization in many sectors from different perspectives. However, the majority of studies primarily focus on the provider of an offering. There is a lack of in-depth studies on analysing servitization challenges from the broader set of network actors including customers, suppliers, and sub-suppliers at the intra-firm and inter-firm levels. A multiple case study method was used to analyse five product-centric firms from different industries that were engaged in servitization. At intra-firm level, our analysis shows that 'coordination' is a major challenge for the provider, supplier, and sub-suppliers, and that 'uncertainty' and 'risk' is a major challenge for the provider, customer, and supplier. At inter-firm level, 'partnership management' found to be a most significant challenge for provider, customer, supplier, and sub-suppliers. The study contributes to the discussion of the relational view approach for servitization research.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Cambridge University Press, 2019. p. 3071-3080
Series
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, E-ISSN 2220-4342
Keywords [en]
Business models, Circular economy, Considerations, Product-Service Systems (PSS), Ecosystems, Risk assessment, Sales, In-depth study, Multiple-case study, Network actors, Productservice system (PSS), Relational views, Uncertainty analysis
National Category
Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-47964DOI: 10.1017/dsi.2019.314Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85079764780OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hj-47964DiVA, id: diva2:1413933
Conference
22nd International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED 2019, Delft, Netherlands, 5 - 8 August 2019
2020-03-112020-03-112020-03-11Bibliographically approved