Exploring servitization and digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises: evidence from an industrial internet platform in China

Abstract

Servitization is vital to manufacturing enterprises’ competitive advantages and financial performance in contemporary digitalisation environments. Enterprises are increasingly relying on industrial Internet platforms to satisfy potential customers’ needs as well as to create superior value, but the literature has neglected to explain how enterprises can leverage such digital platform to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of servitization. This study aims at describing how the industrial Internet platform can enable servitization of manufacturers. Based upon the meta-theoretical foundations of service-dominant logic, we identify the ‘sense and respond’ servitization strategy enabled by the industrial Internet platform. By performing a questionnaire survey, we find that the industrial Internet platform approach based on the connectivity and compatibility architecture can enable manufacturers to improve the efficiency of resource integration and resource reconfiguration, which facilitates the implementation of servitization via market perception . We argue that the industrial Internet platform affects an organisation’s ability to sense the market and resource management actions; these operational resource actions are a significant antecedent of the servitization strategy.