This paper presents the findings from four case studies on stakeholder engagement in new health information and communication technology (ICT) product-service system (PSS) development. The degree of connectivity between the new health ICT PSS and its operating environment has emerged to be an important contextual factor that may impact stakeholder engagement in the early stage development process. Along with the proposition of a four-level framework to guide systematic stakeholder identification for new PSS development, three other propositions for analyzing stakeholder engagement based on the degree of connectivity are developed. Analysis of the findings has shown that the connectivity between an ICT PSS and its operating environment can be separated into data connectivity and process connectivity. Moreover, each type of connectivity could be characterized in terms of three categories: independent, linked or incorporated. Furthermore, depending upon whether and to what extent the PSS has data and process connectivity with its intended operating environment, the stakeholder engagement needs in early stage development vary. The propositions presented in this paper provide important directions for future work exploring how contextual factors impact stakeholder engagement in early stage new PSS development in the healthcare industry.

Since the 1970s, marketing and innovation management communities have been investigating how to incorporate customer-desired functions into new product and service designs. These wide-ranging enquiries have shed light on the impact of lead-user engagement in new product development, demonstrated ways to examine service production and delivery, such as the use of 'line of visibility' in service blueprints and the modelling of 'service encounters', and have created new terms such as 'value co-creation'. Despite these efforts, recent reviews have identified the lack of an holistic approach to new product-service system (PSS) development. This deficiency needs to be rectified, especially for complex PSS developments in regulated industries such as healthcare, as often there are multiple stakeholders posing conflicting priorities to the development team. This paper describes a novel PSS characterisation approach that supports the early-stage new PSS development process. The approach is originated from eleven healthcare case studies, involving twenty-five new products, services and PSSs. Following the methodology of action research, further cases are selected for the application of the approach to a new product, service or PSS concept in facilitated workshops. Initial implications of employing this approach in three cases are discussed in this paper.

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The engineering design process transforms stakeholder needs into design specifications. This study focuses on the engineering design process for systems of products and services known as product-service systems (PSS) and proposes a novel way to analyze PSS ideas by four characteristics: customer perceived value level, connectivity number, type and degree of connectivity, and configuration type. The process to apply this characterization scheme examines the inter-dependencies within a PSS and between the PSS and its environment and holistically incorporates the interests of customers, end-users, and social and environmental stakeholders early in the development process. This process clarifies design specifications in seven cases across five industries.