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.