Overcoming the challenges that hinder new service development by manufacturers with diverse services strategies

Abstract

This is a pre-print (non-publisher's document).

Knowledge Asymmetries and Service Management: Three Case Studies

“…The objective of this paper is to examine the effects of increasing knowledge intensity and the use of information systems by service firms in response to differing views in the literature. While some argue that service firms are involved in increasing levels of client interaction and participation (Xie et al, 2016;Vence & Trigo, 2009a;Nordin et al, 2011b;Miles, 1993;Bitner et al 2008) while others (Sundbo, 1994(Sundbo, , 2008Rust & Miu, 2006;Davis et al 2007;Den Hertog et al, 2007) suggest that information systems are being used to standardize and leverage, or modularize (Peters & Saidin, 2000;Sundbo, 2002;Nordin et al, 2011b, Burton, 2017 what were initially unique customer interactions. We draw on case studies of service-focused departments of three knowledge-intensive multi-national firms to examine whether information systems were used to provide unique or standardized services to clients, and to examine the impact of such use on client interaction.…”

“…There is more interaction and feedback from customers in services than in manufacturing (Kindstrom and Kowalkowski, 2009), and likely this has been partly driven by value creation from big data in the digital age (Xie et al, 2016). The degree of interaction between service provider and client has been identified as a key difference between services and manufacturing activities (Burton, 2017;Gallouj and Weinstein, 1997a) contributing to successful innovation in services (Alam, 2006;Sundbo, 1997) and improving service-firm performance (Salunke et al, 2013;Agarwal and Selen, 2009;Carbonell et al, 2009;Frambach et al, 1998;Haliday and Troth, 2010;, Melton and Hartline, 2010). Close and continuous interaction between client and providers required due to the intangible nature of services (Miles, 1993).…”

“…Following that, more quantitative studies would be beneficial as qualitative studies have obvious generalizability limitations - Qu et al (2016) also made this recommendation. As Burton et al (2017) point out, future research could also test the impact of the themes and challenges identified by analyzing the types of strategic responses adopted by a large sample of manufacturing organizations and other industrial case studies (Lindstrom et al, 2015). Also, the role of information systems in codifying knowledge, its use by the service provider, and how it might provide a computer mediated environment through which customer interactions take place could be included in future work.…”

“…The purpose of this paper is to investigate how information systems are used by knowledgeintensive service firms and identify their effects on client-provider interactions, and to examine the interaction between service provider and customer as well as the balance to be struck between providing unique and standardized services. Service innovation or servitization (Burton et al, 2017, Shi et al, 2017, Lindstrom et al, 2015 is a key concern for many firms (Kindstrom et al, 2013) because it is a critical way for firms to differentiate themselves from their competitors (Bitner et al, 2008), and sustain competitive advantage while honing their key capabilities (Burton et al, 2017, Salunke et al, 2013, Gray et al, 2007, Johne and Storey, 1998 as well as being a key factor both in economic growth and innovation strategy (Sakata et al, 2013). Due to commoditization, there has been an increasing need for some product-centric firms to add a service component to remain competitive (Spring and Araujo, 2013).…”

Servitization in Support of Sustainable Cities: What Are Steel’s Contributions and Challenges?

“…Although headed in the right direction from an environmental standpoint, this counterintuitively went against some of the principles of sustainability: Selling services without addressing their resource demands ended up, in some cases, increasing material consumption [6,8]. It was when academics, involved in what is called redistribution and sharing within the circular economy framework drove their attention to service-providing practices already in place that servitization found new grounds and began receiving more support as a means to retain resources longer in the economy, creating value from service and circularity instead of value from natural resource extraction and transformation [9,33,34].…”