Servitization in SME manufacturing firms : A one-way road

• The importance for manufacturing firms to add services to their offerings has been asserted over and over again (Neu and Brown 2005). Adding services to product sales require manufacturing firms to develop other types of offerings such as maintenance services, hybrid offerings or integrated solutions. This implies using new and often unknown practices to be able to provide services. Previous research has focused on the benefits of servitization (Gebauer, Gustafsson, and Witell 2011), albeit in larger firms. Hence, similar research on Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME) has been scarce. Furthermore, servitization as a unidirectional transition process can be questioned as researchers argue that manufacturing firms might offer different types of services simultaneously and might not have the intention to take the next step that a transition process suggests (Kowalkowski et al. 2015). Moreover, previous research shows that the step from offering after-sales services and repair to offering more advanced services, e.g. process-related services, is rather big. For those services different mindsets are required within the organization; more advanced services would require a service oriented mindset, whereas after-sales services only requires the firm to have a product oriented mindset (Löfberg 2014).

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Servitization

SMEs

Service - orientation

Product - orientation

Business Administration

Företagsekonomi

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)