Exploring technology-driven service innovation in manufacturing firms through the lens of Service Dominant logic

This paper attempts to explore technology-driven service innovation in manufacturing firms. It addresses the characteristics and ‘smartness’ of services provided by manufacturing companies and large OEMs within the context of product service systems enabled by Industry 4.0/IoT technologies (i.e. digital servitization). The paper takes ten different IOT-based service systems, and through the lens of Service Dominant (SD) logic analyses the different approaches used in service innovation. The dimensions used for the analysis are ‘service ecosystem’, ‘service platform’ and ‘value co-creation’. It was found, in some cases, that the proposed innovations cannot be considered ‘smart’ through the lens of SD logic, since they contribute little to value co-creation and to the development of ecosystems. Nevertheless, this does not negate their usefulness. We further discriminate between the different approaches to digital servitization, respectively app-ization and system-thinking. Last, the paper highlights that enabling technologies are provided by players that differ in terms of service scope and capabilities to run the service operations.