How additive manufacturing drives business model change: The perspective of logistics service providers

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is expected to facilitate local manufacturing in shorter, less complex supply chains and, thus, impact the demand for traditional logistics services. With increasing dissemination, AM confronts logistics service providers (LSPs) with the question of how they should adapt their business model to the threats and opportunities that come with the emerging digital technologies. We structure the AM activities of LSPs and develop a deep understanding of their resulting business model dynamics. For this exploratory purpose, this study develops a taxonomy and performs a cluster analysis to present six clusters of how LSPs approach AM today. The six profiles include LSPs that reactively monitor AM or, in contrast, proactively leverage AM for their internal operations and the development of new services for their external customers. Among them, four profiles entail fundamental changes to the traditional business models of LSPs. We find that these LSPs oftentimes continue to rely on their traditional “analog” service strengths to offer integrated service bundles of AM and logistics solutions. They bridge their lack of specific resources by strategic alliances with AM experts. Only a few LSPs have started severing ties to their traditional businesses to develop digitally dominated, platform-based AM services that require different resources. Overall, the comprehensive picture of AM activities enables us to contribute to the knowledge of how LSPs navigate in the digital age and to the nexus of business model dynamics and emerging technologies. We propose a set of propositions and support practitioners in analyzing and designing AM activities.