Conceptualizing customer value in data-driven services and smart PSS

In the age of the industrial internet, manufacturers of industrial equipment compete through the offering of digital product-service solutions. These are built integrating smart connected products (SCP) and data-driven services, such as remote control, data analytics, diagnostic and predictive maintenance services. These services strongly influence the value created in the customer context and, consequently, the attractiveness of the integrated offering. A great issue remains about how these services should be designed by manufacturers of industrial equipment. Through integrative literature review over multiple domains, this paper provides a conceptual model that shows: i) which benefits can be created from smart product-service systems offerings at both business and individual level, in the customer organization; ii) how these benefits are linked to the choices about design and delivery of data-driven services. In respect to the second point, this study merges service science theory and data management to show how the data autonomously collected by SCP can be transformed into insights that deliver value, as far as the customer and the supplier interact, share resources and apply their specialized competences. Applying these concepts, we elaborate four exemplary archetypes of data-driven services that differ in respect to the kind of customer-supplier interactions along this data life cycle, bringing these options to different kind of customer value co-creation. Linking the mechanisms of value co-creation to design options of data-driven services, this paper has therefore notably implications for the research on servitization and smart product-service systems.