Innovation in Servitization through Digital Technologies

The application of digital technologies within servitization is an emerging phenomenon. Research to date has identified the use of different digital technologies by manufacturers to enhance their servitization efforts, such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing and big data. However, the application of these technologies within the servitization domain has had limited attention using an innovation lens. This is despite digital technologies often resulting in improved or extended service offerings (e.g., remote diagnostics to enhance an existing maintenance service), new service offerings (e.g., an availability offering) or even new service business models (i.e., replacement of a product business model with a service business model). The current study aims to investigate different types of service innovation modes, from incremental through intermediate to radical, with a particular focus on the latter, which is often seen as most important for improving manufacturers’ performance but remains elusive in practice. Due to the limited extent of existing work in this area, case studies are used to investigate the phenomenon, as they facilitate the collection of rich data sets enabling development of academic and practical insights.