A Bibliometric Analysis of Product-Service Systems’ Design Methodologies: Potential Root-Cause Identification of PSS’ Failures

Product-service system (PSS) innovation is acknowledged as a promising way to achieve sustainability through better exploitation of given resources. Nevertheless, PSS implementation is also described as increasing failure risk for companies. Despite that authors have identified paradoxical situations as a source of failure while implementing PSS, few researches have focused on understanding the origin of these paradoxes. In this review, we aim at understanding how methodologies cope with the challenges of designing PSS throughout the complete company perimeter as well as how to manage interactions within this perimeter to avoid potential paradoxes and thus failure. To do so, we will rely on the business model innovation literature and, more specifically, the business model canvas to define and discretize the company perimeter. As for the interactions and their imbrication regarding paradoxes appearance, we will refer to Putnam et al. theory to gain deeper understanding of paradoxes-appearance mechanism. Our bibliometric strategy brought us to analyze 14 international articles via our graph, enabling us to highlight that some poles’ interactions during design are partly unaddressed, resulting potentially in the creation of tension sources and therefore potential paradoxes and ultimately implementation failure. Considering this, future research works could focus on defining all significant interactions to consider while designing a PSS as well as the typology of answers to engage while facing tensions. In that respect, these works could provide actionable solutions to lower PSS implementation-failure risk, thus benefiting those who wish to achieve better sustainability through PSS.