A Strategic Double-Loop Learning Method for Organisational Decision-Making toward Servitisation

In recent years, manufacturing industries have been expected to achieve servitisation—namely, a shift from product sales to product-service systems—in order to achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns. In order to achieve servitisation, manufacturing firms should grasp the business environment and encourage organisational learning to develop the knowledge for servitisation in their environment. The existing knowledge management studies enable the empirical acquisition and reuse of knowledge from past case studies and make efforts to support organisational learning. However, they do not cover the guiding of firms engaged in servitisation to learn appropriately for their business environment. The learning required for manufacturing firms engaged in servitisation is learning that focuses on questioning and modifying existing product-oriented premises—double-loop learning. This paper proposes a method to support strategic double-loop learning within manufacturing companies engaged in servitisation. This method evaluates the compatibility between the implicit premises that manufacturers refer to as the rationale for their decision toward servitisation and the external environment and enables to formulate a practical strategy for double-loop learning. The proposed method was applied to the case of a cassette tape music player to demonstrate its usefulness. This study suggests theoretical foundations for future research into knowledge management for traditional manufacturing companies’ decisions concerning servitisation, and suggests that these should be carried out dynamically according to the business environment.