Digital servitization in manufacturing as a new stream of research: a review and a further research agenda

The transition of manufacturing firms from products to services, generally referred
as servitization, has been addressed by a growing amount of scientific literature
in recent years. This transformation path has been analysed and described from
diverse research streams, providing a variety of potentials for competition such as
economical, organizational, customer satisfaction and so on (Oliva and Kallenberg,
2003; Ostrom et al., 2010). Today fast-evolving digital technologies are presenting
new opportunities for developing customized value propositions, with higher
quality services and deeper customer relationships (Rust and Huang, 2014). The
adoption of digital technologies seems therefore to represent a crucial element
for servitization, radically modifying the way companies deliver existing services
and enabling new services and business models (Adrodegari and Saccani, 2017).
However, although recent studies have highlighted the critical role of technologies
in servitization, literature has failed to sufficiently consider this transformation
as two sides of the same coin (Grubic and Jennions, 2017). As a result, insights
about how companies can adopt and implement new technologies to successfully
servitize are still very limited.
To address this shortcoming, this chapter provides a systematic literature review
that identifies, collects and systematizes the available scientific contributions on
digital servitization in order to identify directions for future research and highlight
practical implications for manufacturers.