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Overcoming the challenges that hinder new service development by manufacturers with diverse services strategies

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-03-03, 14:48 authored by James O. Burton, Victoria StoryVictoria Story, Chris Raddats, Judy Zolkiewski
This paper explores the new service development (NSD) challenges that manufacturers face in undertaking servitization initiatives and their attempts to overcome these challenges. Prior work identifies some generic NSD challenges and manufacturers' responses to them. However, understanding how such responses relate to the manufacturer's services strategy remains under-explored. Recent research suggests that manufacturers adopt diverse service strategies and this diversity provides the context for our study. Four case studies are undertaken in large UK-based manufacturers with services strategies differing with respect to the importance of services within their portfolios of offerings. We identify several NSD process challenges facing manufacturers and discuss how the case organisations seek to respond to them. Different degrees of product-logic drive NSD for each of the cases, suggesting manufacturers risk losing key product advantages if they try to 'break free' from their product heritage. However, this can limit the role that services ultimately play in a manufacturing business, potentially putting it at risk from other actors' radical service innovations. Responses to challenges differ depending on the services strategy adopted. The more enthusiastic organisations have to overcome more challenges than those demonstrating lower levels of enthusiasm. The study offers a more nuanced understanding of how manufacturers can overcome key NSD challenges to create new services. Based on the study, seven propositions are presented regarding NSD by manufacturing organisations.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

International Journal of Production Economics

Volume

192

Pages

29-39

Citation

BURTON, J.O. ...et al., 2017. Overcoming the challenges that hinder new service development by manufacturers with diverse services strategies. International Journal of Production Economics, 192, pp.29-39.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-01-17

Publication date

2017-01-19

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This paper was published in the journal International Journal of Production Economics and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2017.01.013.

ISSN

0925-5273

Language

  • en