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Given the considerable success of companies such as Apple, Amazon or Airbnb, the term platform is on everyone’s lips today. Accordingly, platforms have long since also found their way into service science. However, mastering the transition from established product-sales-based offerings to platform-based services and business models comes with a multitude of challenges. In a B2B context, incumbent companies need to carefully evaluate how they can benefit from the establishment of platforms, especially in light of the effects on their existing business models and ties to other actors. Hence, we invited scholars with different backgrounds to provide viewpoints on the opportunities and challenges of the transition to platform-based services and business models in a B2B environment. The individual commentaries provide various insights on how to conduct this transition and benefit from it successfully. To do so, they contrast different approaches for establishing and governing ecosystems around platforms, discuss B2B-specific pitfalls and opportunities of platform business models, uncover the supporting role of platforms for smart service development, and stress the importance of platform and ecosystem thinking as a necessary mindset.

Progress in technologies such as cloud computing or artificial intelligence currently paves the way for services that rely on the exploitation of data. The resulting smart services, however, are only gradually finding their way into practical application. A reason for this delay has been identified in the limited applicability of existing service engineering methods for smart services. In this paper, we identify critical perspectives to address in smart service engineering. Subsequently, we conduct a literature review to identify the extent to which these perspectives are covered by current smart service engineering methods. Our results indicate that even though there is a significant number of smart service engineering methods, some perspectives are rarely considered. We offer practitioners and researchers an overview of the status quo of smart service engineering, thus supporting the former in the selection of methods and pointing out avenues for future research to the latter.

Nicht immer gelingt bei der Arbeitsgestaltung die Synthese von Humanität und Ökonomie. Ergonomische Arbeitsmittel können hohe Anschaffungs- und Instandhaltungskosten haben, so dass sie sich erst nach einigen Jahren amortisieren. Möchte man die Körperhaltungen bei der Arbeit verbessern und die umzusetzenden Lastgewichte verringern, sind zwar vielfältige Hebehilfen am Markt verfügbar. Oft sind diese jedoch so langsam, so dass sie nicht innerhalb einer vorgegebenen Zykluszeit eingesetzt werden können. Viele Arbeitsgegenstände können auch mit den klassischen Hebehilfen nicht manipuliert werden. So zum Beispiel Großformatbleche, die auf einer Laserschneidanlage geschnitten werden sollen.