Manufacturers’ IT-Enabled Service Innovation Success as a Multifaceted Phenomenon: A Configurational Study

Manufacturers employ information technology (IT) resources to improve existing services and develop new services. Digital servitization literature has been exploring mechanisms to achieve success in IT-enabled service innovation. Research indicates that manufacturers’ IT-enabled service innovation is a multifaceted phenomenon of organized complexity driven by a few factors. The knowledge-based view and the organizational control theory offer two theoretical starting points to explain how IT capabilities, organizational control mechanisms, and the innovativeness of services result in success of IT-enabled service innovation. This paper deductively derives a configurational research model to explain manufacturers’ IT-enabled service innovation success. The outlook describes the steps to be taken to test the research model: data collection, data transformation, and set-theoretic analysis using a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). The intended results contribute to digital servitization and information systems research to explain mechanisms of IT-enabled service innovation success while offering advice to manufacturers undergoing digital servitization