1 research outputs found
Intra-Firm and Inter-Firm Challenges in Servitization Ecosystem: Experiences from Five Product-Centric Firms in Different Industries
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the challenges in the servitization journey of product-centric
firms from an ecosystem perspective, considering both intra-firm and inter-firm levels. Prior research
addresses the challenges of servitization in many sectors from different perspectives. However, the
majority of studies primarily focus on the provider of an offering. There is a lack of in-depth studies on
analysing servitization challenges from the broader set of network actors including customers, suppliers,
and sub-suppliers at the intra-firm and inter-firm levels. A multiple case study method was used to
analyse five product-centric firms from different industries that were engaged in servitization. At intrafirm
level, our analysis shows that ‘coordination’ is a major challenge for the provider, supplier, and
sub-suppliers, and that ‘uncertainty’ and ‘risk’ is a major challenge for the provider, customer, and
supplier. At inter-firm level, ‘partnership management’ found to be a most significant challenge for
provider, customer, supplier, and sub-suppliers. The study contributes to the discussion of the relational
view approach for servitization research