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

Researchers are building increasing competence in the area of servitization 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 applicable to service providers, manufacturers, and other actors such as distributors. 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 manufacturer-focused servitization. We use exemplar vignettes to bring some of these issues to life and illustrate how ISPs may be better placed than manufacturers to address these key business activities to implement servitization.