Multiple perspectives on product-service transition and its influence on business model design in manufacturing firms

Business practice shows that manufacturing firms recently strive for securing and enhancing their competitive position by overcoming their traditional product-centric way of acting and employing a service-related strategy. This product-service transition provides benefits for manufacturing firms such as differentiation opportunities, a new source of revenues, as well as the option to create a better fit to changed customer behavior. However, many manufacturing firms are not able to benefit from a service-related strategy as they fail to establish a business model that supports product-service transition and therefore experience difficulties in operationalizing such a strategy. However, research has by now not paid sufficient attention to the identification of business models that support product-service transition and to the change process that comes along with implementing a new business model. Moreover, research on product-service transition usually focuses on various servicerelated aspects and analyzes them in isolation. Such a decoupled analysis does not foster a holistic understanding how manufacturing firms can benefit from service-related strategies. By employing the business model as a new unit of analysis and using qualitative-empirical research, this thesis (1) overcomes the narrow, unidimensional focus on product-service transition as it provides evidence that manufacturing firms employ different service strategies that are reflected in different distinct business model configurations in order to pursue product-service transition; (2) analyzes business model change processes in established manufacturing firms in detail and shows that business model change in the context of productservice transition is very often an incremental and emergent process; (3) highlights antecedents that influence a manufacturing firm’s business model design choice as well as barriers that decelerate the business model change process in the context of product-service transition