Moving Beyond Manufacturing: Building a Research Agenda for Servitizing Service Firms and Ecosystems

Researchers are building increasing competence in the area of ser-vitization with respect to manufacturing and more recently digital servitization. A much smaller volume of work considers the value of servitization for service organizations and ecosystems, despite early recognition that servitization is ap-plicable to service providers, manufacturers, and other actors such as distribu-tors. This provides an opportunity to move beyond manufacturing to explore how servitization applies and manifests in service providers. The paper uses concepts from Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) and Service Science and focuses on key business activities undertaken by actors in an ecosystem and considers them for independent service providers (ISPs); that is, not companies acting as distributors for manufacturers’ products. Thus, this paper builds a research agenda for this embryonic research area, combining key strands of existing manufacturer-based research and applying them to a service provider context. We consider how the characteristics of ISPs might lead to differences to manu-facturer-focused servitization. We use exemplar vignettes to bring some of these issues to life and illustrate how ISPs may be better placed than manufac-turers to address these key business activities to implement servitization.