Abstract
Recent economic transformations have forced companies to redefine their value propositions, increasing traditional product offerings with supplementary services—the so-called Product-Service System (PSS). Among them, the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies is very common. However, the directions that companies are undertaking to offer new value to their customers in the Industry 4.0 have not yet been investigated in detail. Based on a focus group, this paper contributes to this understanding by identifying the main trajectories that would shape a future scenario in which PSS and Industry 4.0 would merge. In addition, future research directions addressing (a) the transformation of the PSS value chain into a PSS ecosystem, (b) the transformation inside a single company towards becoming a PSS provider, and (c) the digital transformation of the traditional PSS business model are identified.
Highlights
In recent years, manufacturing companies have been strongly pushed by saturated and commoditised global competitive environments to significantly transform the nature of their businesses, from being owners of competencies and resources to becoming integrators of skills, resources and technologies able to realise complex value creation processes (Cáceres and Guzmán 2015; Marilungo et al 2017; Lindhult et al 2018)
This paper aims to contribute to this gap by answering the following research question:
Industry 4.0 has been defined as ‘a new industrial maturity stage based on the connectivity provided by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the use of several digital technologies such as cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence’ (Benitez et al 2020)
Summary
In recent years, manufacturing companies have been strongly pushed by saturated and commoditised global competitive environments to significantly transform the nature of their businesses, from being owners of competencies and resources to becoming integrators of skills, resources and technologies able to realise complex value creation processes (Cáceres and Guzmán 2015; Marilungo et al 2017; Lindhult et al 2018) This evolution, often referred to as servitization (Vandermerwe and Rada 1988) or service transformation (Cavalieri et al 2017), implies a complete change of the traditional product-based business model towards a new approach.
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