Abstract
PurposeThe paper attempts to address the following research questions (RQs): RQ1: What are the main research topics within PSS research? RQ2: What are future trends for PSS research?Design/methodology/approachTwenty years of research (1999–2018) on product-service systems (PSS) produced a significant amount of scientific literature on the topic. As the PSS field is relatively new and fragmented across different disciplines, a review of the prior and relevant literature is important in order to provide the necessary framework for understanding current developments and future perspectives. This paper aims to review and organize research contributions regarding PSS. A machine-learning algorithm, namely Latent Dirichlet Allocation, has been applied to the whole literature corpus on PSS in order to understand its structure.FindingsThe adopted approach resulted in the definition of eight distinct and representative topics able to deal adequately with the multidisciplinarity of the PSS. Furthermore, a systematic review of the literature is proposed to summarize the state-of-the-art and limitations in the identified PSS research topics. Based on this critical analysis, major gaps and future research challenges are presented and discussed.Originality/valueOn the basis of the results of the topic landscape, the paper presents some potential research opportunities on PSSs. In particular, challenges, transversal to the eight research topics and related to recent technology trends and digital transformation, have been discussed.
Highlights
The last two decades have seen a growing trend toward research on product-service systems (PSSs)
What are future trends for PSS research? A specific research goal is the recognition of current and future research priorities to address the academic community’s efforts. Trying to answer these questions, this paper provides the following three main contributions: (1) it proposes a conceptual framework – i.e. a topic landscape – to support identifying and understanding topics and trends in PSS research over the last 20 years, (2) it provides an updated overview of issues discussed in PSS literature and (3) it identifies and analyses emerging trends and possible research directions related to PSS
The analysis reported in this article provides insight into what PSS research has been over the past 20 years and offers a key to understanding how it might evolve in the near future
Summary
The last two decades have seen a growing trend toward research on product-service systems (PSSs). One of the first definitions of the concept was provided by Goedkoop et al (1999) who stated that PSSs are “systems of products, services, networks of “players” and supporting infrastructure that continuously strives to be competitive, satisfy customer needs and have a lower environmental impact than traditional business models”. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ legalcode
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