Digital servitization allows companies to establish specific entry barriers and create isolating mechanisms to maintain their products' competitive advantage. Rapid linking of technologies with products has introduced new mechanisms to deliver services that complement product offerings. This business environment has significantly affected food companies in the retail sector, where companies have begun to implement and rely on digital solutions to support business operations to fulfill changing market conditions. The study demonstrates how the Covirán cooperative is improving service provision through digital capabilities to generate isolating mechanisms that enable the company to achieve a superior competitive position.

The growing trend to develop product–service innovation (PSI) in manufacturing industries has forced firms to consider the real impact of adding services to their sales portfolio. Literature has shown that PSI implementation has heterogeneous effects on performance as it depends on the service development choice and the specific industry in which firms compete. Moreover, PSI implementation has differing effects on performance depending on the manufacturer’s position in the value ecosystem. Although the heterogeneous PSI–performance relationship has previously been studied in terms of its intensity, research has not yet examined whether services should support specific stages or the entire product lifecycle. For shedding light on this issue, a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is carried out on a sample of Basque firms that operate in the machine manufacturing sector. This useful technique uncovers a set of specific service combinations that maximize manufacturers’ profit margin and ratio of solvency. As a result, this study is novel in analyzing the service provision over the entire product lifecycle and reveals that although some service complementarities do exist, single or bundled service specialization outperforms an integral and diversified service approach.