Linking manufacturing ecosystems theory with servitization: a 'nested' solutions-based approach

Vanderwerme et al. (1988) identified servitization as manufacturing companies making the shift from selling purely goods to selling bundles of goods, services, support, and knowledge. This shift represents a customer-centric approach where a focus on delivering features and functionality within a tangible product is replaced with a focus on delivering value in use. This shift usually represents a strategic change in a company’s opera3ons (Baines and W. Lightfoot, 2014) and is often driven by new technology (Xu et al., 2018). More recently digitalization has introduced a new technology pathway for manufacturers to extend their servitization strategy (Coreynen et al., 2017). As digital servitization is a relatively new area of study, business models for the deployment of digital product service bundles have still to be characterised (Paschou et al., 2020).

This paper seeks to address this gap by using manufacturing ecosystems theory developed by Sminia et al. (2019), Sminia et al. (2022), Paton et al. (2023), and Ates et al. (2023) within a case-based approach to analyse the strategic development and operational implementation of a digitally enabled servitization business model by a manufacturing company.