Digitized Products: Challenges and Practices from the Creative Industries

Recent digital technologies like the Internet of Things and Augmented Reality have brought IT into companies’ core products. What were previously purely physical products are becoming hybrid or digitized. Despite receiving a lot of recent attention, digitized products have only seen a slow uptake in businesses so far. In this paper, we study the challenges that keep companies from realizing the desired impacts of digitized products and the practices they employ to address these challenges. To do so, we looked at companies from a set of industries that are highly affected by digital transformation, but at the same time hesitant to move to a more digitized world: the creative industries. Based on a literature review and twelve interviews in creative industries, we developed a conceptual model that can serve as a basis for formulating testable hypotheses for further research in this area