Barriers and Challenges Toward the Servitization of the Machinery Sector: Evidence from Theory and Practice

Business offerings based on the sale of services on top of products is always more diffused, disclosing the opportunity of defining new business models based on subscription or product performance. To remain competitive on the market, manufacturers are always more frequently relying on servitized business models, and nowadays an increasing number of studies is addressing this topic in terms of benefits for these companies and possible obstacles to a successful implementation. This paper wants to contribute to this research stream by focusing on the machinery that, due to the nature of their products and the financial exposure required for their production, need to carefully consider the structure of a servitized offering to make it profitable. By a mixed-methodology approach, literature review and empirical survey, the paper aims at listing and discussing the main barriers and challenges that these companies need to address to structure profitable servitized business offerings. The results demonstrate a strong alignment between the obstacles identified in the literature and those observed in the survey regarding the adoption of servitization in the machinery sector. However, it appears that the literature has not extensively focused on defining a strategy for the collection and use of data in support of product and service offerings. In contrast, the survey findings indicate that practitioners do not highlight on incentivizing customer in the co-creation value process and ensuring coordination in the ecosystem.