Servitization as business model contestation: A practice approach

Abstract

In principle, organizations know how to do servitization, but in practice, many struggle to change their business models to include service offerings. To understand this struggle, this paper examines servitization in a large multinational manufacturer within the pulp and paper industry. Utilizing practice theory, the study explicates the servitization process as a contestation of a company's parallel business models-one existing and dominant; one emerging. As business models materialize in organizational practices, and therefore have the potential to frame and organize servitization efforts, the models give rise to contestations in the practices performed by actors in the organization and the ecosystem. The elements of such contestations provide a better understanding of the ways in which practices may be disrupted to support servitization. Contestations can thus be creative instead of problematic. As a result, this paper extends the conceptualization of servitization as a bottom-up, emergent and iterative process of business model contestation.

Life Cycle Costing: Understanding How It Is Practised and Its Relationship to Life Cycle Management—A Case Study

“…Practice theories include a number of theoretical approaches connected by conceptual similarities that have become increasingly used to explain organizational phenomena [14,15,18]. Practice theory is essentially theories that "attempt to provide a new vocabulary to describe the world and to populate the world with specific 'units of analysis'; that is, practices" [14].…”

“…Practices, though, do not have perpetuity qualities; some will be used once, some will endure, some will fade or be transformed over long periods [14]. A new or innovative practice contests extant practices [15,18,25]. For some social scientists, practices are the backbones of social life [13,26].…”

“…Practice theory has been used when researching companies transitioning from sales to PSS, called servitization. Servitization has been conceptualized as integrated sets of practices and practices that become contested (see [18,47] for a more detailed account).…”

“…New or innovative practices contest extant practices [14,15,17]. The outcome of this contestation will influence, if and how a practice is practised in an organization [14,18], and by extension, if it will follow the general pattern of the practice. If LCC is conceptualized as a practice and LCC methods are conceptualized as prescribed or general patterns of LCC practice, then the introduction of LCC in an organization will contest extant practices.…”

Mapping Value Co-creation Literature in the Technology and Innovation Management Field: A Bibliographic Coupling Analysis

“…We have named the yellow cluster "Servitization" because all the documents this group contains deal with this topic. We have found several conceptual papers (Huikkola and Kohtamäki, 2017;Palo et al, 2019;Raddats et al, 2019;Ruiz-Alba et al, 2019) and some case studies (Windahl, 2015;Windler et al, 2017) that contribute to set the fundamentals of this literature. This cluster has a high density, which implies that papers comprising it have a strong connection.…”