State of the Art in Servitization Research

This chapter gives an overview of the state of the art in servitization research. It is step-by-step disclosed in this chapter, how, stepping into the third decade of the twenty-first century, servitization has become one of the most active domains in overall service research, arriving from multiple disciplines: marketing, operations, service management, engineering management, and strategy. It is explained, how the term ‘servitization’ becomes understood more clearly, referring to a particular entity’s transition from a product-driven business model, focused on selling product logic to a more service-oriented business model, focusing on consumer facilitation in value cocreation through advanced services and solutions. The chapter introduces relevant communities of scholars in servitization research, paradoxes of servitization that are confusing industrial economists, and differences between key research areas in manufacturing and farming servitization.