Digital Servitization in Agriculture

Abstract

Servitization describes the process of adding services to complement companies’ core products in order to create additional value for customers. Well-known examples of servitization are Atlas Copco’s compressed-air-as-a-service and Rolls-Royce’s power-by-the-hour service. For long, the manufacturing sector has been the subject of much debate about how digital technologies can enable companies to provide advanced services to customers; this transition is known as “digital servitization.” In this chapter, we explore how digital servitization benefits not only manufacturers but also farmers and their suppliers. We describe three cases in detail—a chicken poultry farm and two equipment suppliers, one for the horticultural sector and another for the dairy farm sector—and discuss their different transitions from a digital servitization theory lens. Specifically, we describe how the collection and analysis of data provide agricultural companies several pathways for servitization.