Manufacturers’ Service Innovation Efforts: From Customer Projects to Business Models and Beyond

This chapter addresses gaps in the literature about service innovation for servitization by developing a framework of service innovation activities across three dimensions. This research framework provides a basis for theory development since it enables the relationships between key concepts in the field to be articulated and classified. The framework proposed offers a mechanism for both classifying innovation efforts and developing an understanding of the interlinkages between the dimensions explored. It highlights that servitization efforts involve a balance of developing the right incremental and radical services; which match with the firm-level service strategy (from product-centric, through hybrid to service-centric); and that decisions should be seen in the context of the multiple levels that servitization operates at (micro—individual projects; meso—service offering portfolios and business models; and macro—industry-wide ecosystem elements and beyond). In articulating potential interactions between three key service innovation dimensions, the framework offers a systematic research agenda for servitization researchers, that provides a foundation for exploring how these factors and their interactions affect the service innovation–performance relationship.