Within the third wave of digital service innovation, framing is becoming increasingly complex. Accordingly, design practice finds itself in a transition from designing single service solutions that are shared, to designing systemic solutions that are shareable. We report a case study in which we use Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to analyze the framing process that a designer went through when designing a digital service for a Connected Care startup. Results show the importance of the designer's activity awareness and the challenge of dealing with relational complexity when framing the digital service innovation. With this work, we hope to inspire researchers and practitioners with the potential that CHAT has to offer for the reflective practice in digital service innovations.

With the spread of product-service systems as business models the life cycle costs are of increasing importance as a measurement of product cost. A key factor that drives these costs is the desired reliability of the products used to provide the service. Since the customer usually expects as uninterrupted service availability, it is imperative to achieve the the required reliability. Therefore a large variety of methods has been developed to maximize the reliability of a product. But these approaches focus on the maximization of the reliability and disregard the resulting product costs. This can lead to designs that over perform concerning their reliability requirements but also exceed their target costs. Which will result in the product-service system not being competitive in the marketplace or lowering the company's profit. This paper shows an approach on how to use markov chains to enable a quick comparison of life cycle costs from different product-service system designs With this it will be possible to make better informed decisions about the costs of a system while still meeting the reliability targets.

It is estimated that about half of all innovations, such as innovations in mechatronic product-service systems (PSS), fail to deliver the expected benefits to the adopting organization. Different studies point out that one of the main reasons for this is an ineffective implementation process.

In this paper, we argue that, apart from several organizational challenges, insufficient integration of technical and social aspects is one of the reasons for ineffective innovation implementation in the environment of mechatronic PSS.

In order to remedy this weakness, this paper builds on the work of interdisciplinary research collaboration. Experts from technical, socio-technical, and management fields integrate their work within a conceptual innovation implementation management system (IIMS). This IIMS is capable of capturing various methods and models that foster the socio-technical integration in mechatronic PSS. The approach is assessed in a lab-scale demonstration case that is representative of industrial environments.

The presented approach supports an effective innovation implementation process, while the IIMS facilitates individual alignments for future practitioners.

Little study has been done on the adoption of End-of-Life (EoL) strategies on the medical devices industry, despite the reasons why it is an important area of study for the implementation of circularity. The rates of waste in the medical field are alarming and tend to grow. Though presenting a wide potential for EoL strategies implementation, the medical field is also inherently challenging, considering the rigid regulations and product's risk to patients life. This paper analyses 17 Product-Service System case studies identified in the literature. Eleven of them are from various fields of industry, whereas the other six are applied to the medical devices industry. The adoption of EoL strategies - namely repair, reconditioning, remanufacture and recycling - is analysed in each case and compared for the two categories of cases. This adoption is related to the sources of value creation in Circular Economy, to the PSS typology and, at last, special EoL treatment for medical devices is discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the challenges in the servitization journey of product-centric firms from an ecosystem perspective, considering both intra-firm and inter-firm levels. Prior research addresses the challenges of servitization in many sectors from different perspectives. However, the majority of studies primarily focus on the provider of an offering. There is a lack of in-depth studies on analysing servitization challenges from the broader set of network actors including customers, suppliers, and sub-suppliers at the intra-firm and inter-firm levels. A multiple case study method was used to analyse five product-centric firms from different industries that were engaged in servitization. At intra- firm level, our analysis shows that ‘coordination’ is a major challenge for the provider, supplier, and sub-suppliers, and that ‘uncertainty’ and ‘risk’ is a major challenge for the provider, customer, and supplier. At inter-firm level, ‘partnership management’ found to be a most significant challenge for provider, customer, supplier, and sub-suppliers. The study contributes to the discussion of the relational view approach for servitization research.

A growing trend of aging population of China has brought tremendous pressure on the domestic care system, and community education is one of the important content for elderly services. Based on the framework of SAPAD, the community English class in Guangzhou City is taken for case study. Depth research on three stakeholeders-the elderly, social workers and volunteers are carried out by interview, user observation and field research. 6 levels (physical level, syntactic level, empirical level, semantic level, pragmatic level and social level) are extracted based on SAPAD framework, and the behavior- object-significance mapping is completed. Significant clusters of multiple users at different levels are analyzed, and 16 core significant clusters are jointly built. By linking with clustering results of the syntactic level, 6 new function modules are obtained. Finally, the community elderly education service system is built through personas, service blueprint, touch points and storyboard. The new service system will improve learning efficiency, satisfactions and emotional appeals for the elderly, and work efficiency of social workers and volunteers.

Product-service systems (PSS) are being increasingly employed as opportunities to keep innovating. The design of PSS value propositions should focus on the value visualization for stakeholders. However, the PSS representations are still oriented to the customer’ perspective and focus on a process or technological role. This study aims to represent the PSS value proposition in a structured-diagram adapted from the journey map method in combination with the use of the elements of value. A case research was conducted with a high-tech agricultural start-up for representing its value proposition by following a process founded in the practices of journey mapping. Qualitative data analysis was employed to associate the elements of value with the solution, and to verify the consistency of the results. The representation enables the visualization of the stakeholders’ perception regarding the content of the solution as well as the potential value that may be related to it. The experience-centric perspective derived from the journey map associated with the value-related information provides a richer view of the PSS value proposition, which can lead to reflections regarding the solution.

Roadmapping has been addressed as a management approach used to support strategic and innovation planning of organisations over recent decades. This paper introduces a new standpoint for addressing roadmapping through the application of service theories as a way for tackling the demand for the digitalisation of roadmapping. To this end, the concept of roadmapping as a service offer is developed and employed to analyse three customer perspectives of roadmapping: owners and sponsors, team members, and facilitators. Based on a literature review and interviews with roadmapping experts, customer jobs, pains, and gains are described for each of the perspectives. In the end, the paper provides insights for the understanding of the concept of roadmapping service and opens opportunities for further theoretical and empirical developments around this new path. These results are part of a broader research project exploring the digitalisation of roadmapping.

We study a DevOps software development process for a Product-Service System (PSS) using a design structure matrix (DSM) representation. We find unique features such as nested, planned iterations at differing rates which are not evident in conventional engineering development projects. We describe the impact of integrating ongoing operations into a development process and identify some of the enablers that lead to adoption of a DevOps process. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and raise questions for further research.

Product Service Systems (PSS) are increasingly complex and collaborative. For instance, manufacturing companies, service providers, and other companies collaborate and jointly develop and operate a PSS (ex: smart grid), where its constituent elements are managed and operated independently. Managerial independence and operational independence are commonly considered key characteristics of a System of Systems (SoS). Hence, a collaborative PSS exhibits System of Systems (SoSs) characteristics. These systems have previously been introduced as Product Service Systems of Systems (PSSoSs). In this paper, we propose to identify relevant uncertainties in the PSSoS design process. For this purpose, we go beyond the PSSoS concept definition and propose a comprehensive framework for PSS and PSSoS characterization. Moreover, based on both a literature review and an industrial diagnosis, we identify PSSoSs-specific design uncertainties.

Product-service systems (PSS) are solutions that integrate product and services in order to fulfill the customers’ needs by means of greater value in use. Multiple stakeholders should be involved in the design process for the development of a successful PSS value proposition. However, it is not clear who could be the potential stakeholders of a PSS. The aims of this study are to consolidate the stakeholders cited in PSS case studies and to reveal the terms used to refer to “stakeholder” in PSS literature. A systematic literature review was carried out, and an inductive content analysis procedure was applied. A total of 28 stakeholders were listed from the selected studies, whose PSS cases were classified as use- oriented or result-oriented services. Multiple terminologies are used to refer to stakeholders. This study contributes for showing the potential stakeholders that can be involved and engaged in the PSS design and operation. Also, it indicates the terms from which they can be addressed in the PSS literature.