Advice for manufacturing companies to increase their attention to opportunities downstream of production had grown loud by the mid 1990s. Accompanying this advice lay warnings of generic, implementation issues to be addressed in the journey downstream - new marketing and commercial capabilities to be acquired; fresh perspectives on appropriate performance measures; new relationships with customers; and adopt and nurture a service culture and supporting processes.In this exploratory paper we gather and critically analyse the increasing volume of research on servitization strategy implementation from the operations, marketing, and service literatures to summarize and structure current knowledge on the barriers to servitization for manufacturing companies. Contingencies like company size; competitive situation; and the extent of services provided were studied, however, the range of available research was not yet sufficient to draw useful conclusions. The paper therefore concentrates on identifying, assembling and structuring generic barriers to the implementation of servitization strategies from research over the last twenty years to provide researchers and practitioners with an appreciation of the wide scope and implications of a servitization strategy
