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Servitization and Digitalization as “Siamese Twins”: Concepts and Research Priorities

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The Palgrave Handbook of Service Management

Abstract

Across many industries we observe trends to change business models in favor of service offerings (“servitization”) as well as trends to apply digital technologies for value creation (“digitalization”). First, we perform a conceptual analysis to explain their interdependence. Second, we combine a topic modeling literature study and a qualitative expert interview approach to identify key research fields for the service and information system research communities. The work should deepen the understanding of service concepts to inform the purposeful design and application of digital technologies for service innovation along the identified research roadmap—as “high-tech meets high-touch”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While the service sector in OECD countries accounts for 70% of GDP, it employs 73% of the working population (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.SRV.EMPL.ZS, accessed Mar 5, 2021).

  2. 2.

    This projection is based on market sizes compared at market exchange rates. Measured at purchase power parity, E7 markets in 2050 are expected to even be twice the size of the G7 ones (Hawksworth & Chan, <CitationRef CitationID="CR33" >2015</Citation Ref>, p. 8).

  3. 3.

    It may be noted that product-service systems denote systems of value propositions while service systems as introduced in the subsequent section will denote systems of value creation partners and associated resources.

  4. 4.

    It may be noted that—as typical for topic modeling—the clusters do not necessarily indicate coherent entities but are labeled based on their key terms as “labeling focuses on showing not the original words of a topic but rather a clearer label more akin to what a human summary of the data would provide” (Boyd-Graber et al., <CitationRef CitationID="CR13" >2017</Citation Ref>, p. 40). These labels can provide a first orientation and form a starting base for additional research into those clusters.

  5. 5.

    The original source grouped the six research fields further into ecosystems & value creation models, interaction & hybridization, and innovation & development methods. It additionally emphasized the lenses under which those were extracted: value-orientation, innovation-orientation, and human-centricity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Gerhard Satzger & Carina Benz

  2. Institute of Information Systems and Marketing (IISM), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Gerhard Satzger & Carina Benz

  3. Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Tilo Böhmann

  4. Institute of Information Systems, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Angela Roth

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  1. Gerhard Satzger
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Correspondence to Gerhard Satzger .

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  1. CTF, Service Research Center, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Bo Edvardsson  & Bård Tronvoll  & 

  2. Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum, Norway

    Bård Tronvoll

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Satzger, G., Benz, C., Böhmann, T., Roth, A. (2022). Servitization and Digitalization as “Siamese Twins”: Concepts and Research Priorities. In: Edvardsson, B., Tronvoll, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Service Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91828-6_46

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