Definition of an Approach for the Development of Product-Service Systems

Abstract

The concept of Product-Service Systems (PSS) allows companies to offer customer focused products by matching classical product concepts with service concepts. This results in new challenges for the development phase. This publication aims to deduce and discuss a generic PSS development process. Therefore product and service development processes were analyzed and combined to a PSS development process. In its development, a PSS confronts the developer with new challenges. Most of these challenges can be assigned to a certain phase in the development, while some of them appear in the entire life-cycle of a PSS. During this research, it was the aim to match the detected challenges of PSS with methods that have been developed for supporting PSS development. The PSS development process, its challenges and methods are finally applied on a PSS case.