Smart Services Summit

Digital transformation creates tremendous innovation opportunities for medical technology firms. By offering digital services, medical technology firms can support healthcare providers to improve the efficiency and outcomes of care delivery. The shift towards digital-enabled services business models is referred to as digital servitization. However, digital servitization in healthcare is still in its infancy and many medical technology firms struggle to successfully develop and commercialize digital services. As existing research on the topic is scarce, this study investigates the prevailing barriers to digital servitization for medical technology firms. Interviews were conducted with 11 executives of medical technology firms. As a result, 5 key dimensions of digital servitization barriers were identified. This study contributes to current research in digital servitization literature by investigating digital servitization barriers in healthcare. The findings of this paper suggest that medical technology firms need to develop distinct organizational capabilities to overcome these healthcare ecosystem-specific barriers, taking the varied interests of all stakeholders involved into account.

Perishables are very sensitive to their ambient conditions that essentially determine their remaining shelf-lives. Since a large number of perishables spend a significant amount of time in transit or in warehouse storage, it is of paramount importance to appropriately manage warehouse inventory to reduce wastage due to premature spoilage. We consider the use of drones and object-level RFID tags to automate inventory management in warehouses that handle perishables and compare this with the case where all processes are manually done by humans. These scenarios exemplify digital twins with the use of IoT and drones in a warehouse environment and associated value creation for the customer and service provider. Our results indicate that automation through RFID tags and drones help the operators of automated warehouses as well as the customers of such warehouses.

A key objective of this research is to take a more detailed look at a central aspect of resilience in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A literature review and expert interviews were used to investigate which factors have an impact on the innovative capacity of start-ups and whether these can also be adapted by SMEs. First of all, it must be stated that there are considerable structural and process-related differences between start-ups and SMEs. These can considerably inhibit cooperation between the two forms of enterprise. However, in the same context, success factors and issues in the start-up sector could also be identified that can improve cooperation with SMEs. These and other findings are then discussed in both an economic and an academic context. This article was written as part of the research activities of the Smart Services Competence Centre (proper name: Kompetenzzentrum Smart Services), a central contact point for all questions in the area of smart service digitalization in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Here, companies can obtain information about various digital technologies and take advantage of various measures for the development of new ideas and innovative services (Kompetenzzentrum Smart Services BW: Über das Kompetenzzentrum, 2021).

Digitization and the trend to work from home are significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The relocation of the workplace to the home office is accompanied by increased electricity consumption in private households. Furthermore, with the threat of climate change, the transition to renewable energies is becoming increasingly important. This includes the need for new and innovative business models in the energy sector. Artificial intelligence is one of the key technologies for innovation. We investigate how and where artificial intelligence can be incorporated into the business model of a German research project. The business model aims to market renewable energy through a platform where private electricity consumers and producers are part of the user base. With the help of AI, future supply and demand can be forecasted more accurately, which is ecologically and economically beneficial. Chatbot assistance and further applications are presented as well. The resulting added value can benefit both the platform operator as well as the platform users.

During the Covid 19 pandemic, it became apparent how little digital developments such as digital customer communication or the trend towards working from home are used in the energy industry. Particularly small and medium-sized energy companies did not have the digital options to implement digital trends at the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic. For them, this externally imposed change resulted in an acceleration of digitization. Due to this development, there is now an increasing possibility of introducing innovative business models intended to offer customers added value. For this purpose, in addition to an extensive literature search, a hypothesis-based survey of all small and medium-sized energy companies (full survey) in Germany was carried out in 2021. The aim of this empirical survey was to show the current situation and options for action of the energy companies for the introduction of innovative business models and thus to clarify the question: What necessary prerequisites still have to be created in order to introduce innovative business models?

Smart services disrupt business models and have the potential to stimulate the circular economy transition of regions, enabling an environmentally friendly atmosphere for sustainable and innovation-driven growth of regions. Although smart services are powerful means for deploying circular economy goals in industrial practices, there is little systematic guidance on how the adoption of smart services could improve resource efficiency and stimulate smart regional innovation-driven growth, enabled through circular design. Implemented in the scope of Vorarlberg’s smart specialization strategy, this paper contributes to the literature on the circular economy and regional innovation-driven growth by assessing critical factors of the value creation and value capture implemented within the scope of the quadruple helix system. By identifying the main challenges and opportunities of collaborative value creation and value capture in setting-up smart circular economy strategies and by assessing the role of innovation actors within the quadruple helix innovation system, the study provides recommendations and set of guidelines for managers and public authorities in managing circular transition. Finally, based on the analysis of the role of actors in creating shared value and scaling-up smart circular economy practices in the quadruple helix innovation systems, the paper investigates the role of banks as enablers of circular economy innovation-driven regional growth and smart value creation.

An end-to-end approach for near-real-time decision support services constructed of different elements from the fields of digital twins, decision support systems, data analytics, symbiotic simulations, and product-service systems is proposed based on a literature review. Parts of the concept have been validated based on two practical cases in an earlier research project. The model presented combines elements of those existing approaches from the literature into a single end-to-end model. The resulting end-to-end model will be tested in an industrial context to support service decision-makers.

Digital twins (DTs) provide numerous opportunities for value creation in manufacturing. Services enabled by DTs include remote monitoring of assets’ conditions and predictive maintenance. In this paper, we introduce novel, previously unexplored services based on a fully virtualized machine tool, which are targeted at increasing machine operators’ productivity. This allows conducting procedures, such as operator training at a virtual machine tool, which results in the real machine tool being available for value adding activities. Beyond operator training, we envision further potential applications of the virtual machine tool including the run-in of new processes and collision detection.

Smart products generate data during their entire life cycle. The usage of data during the first two lifecycle phases (beginning-of-life and middle-of-life) of a product is well researched. This study aims to investigate the origin, and the value creation of data that takes place in the final phase of the lifecycle through a systematic literature review. The findings are classified in a two-dimensional manner. A first dimension splits the data category into product-, context- and customer-related data and the second dimension splits the data sources into external, internal and thing related sources. Most of the data resources exploited for end-of-life decisions in the literature can be associated to the data category product, originating from the sources thing and internal system. The results show that use cases such as disposal, recycling, reuse, and refurbishment, which generate end-of-life value using life cycle data, are rarely described in the academic literature.

The work concept of coworking has emerged in recent decades and coworking spaces offer an attractive environment and a casual and appealing atmosphere. Generally, coworking is understood as the flexible rental and termination of office space, workstations, or even creative spaces. The use is attractive for start-ups, traditional companies—especially development teams—and self-employed people. These are open work and communication areas where people can make contacts and exchange ideas with like-minded people. The philosophy and mindset of coworking will be analyzed in this paper against the background of customer relationships, especially in field service activities. Field Service Management stands for the optimized deployment planning of a company's mobile resources to handle service or maintenance orders. The resources include internal and external technical staff in the field, vehicles, and other tools or machines.

The aim of this paper is to develop a more sophisticated methodology for market segmentation of Industrial smart services. Prior research in the service literature has focused less to assess the attractiveness of digital transformation (i.e. data captured, transformed, and analyzed) for this purpose. Moreover, the intrinsic performance orientation from a buyer perspective has been seldom discussed in the literature. A proposed framework sheds light after conducting 29 interviews with firms active in construction and metals production environments. Qualitatively, the study unveiled the importance of the holistic understanding of both operation and purchasing considerations required towards the supply management of smart services as the main strengths of this framework.

Research increasingly covers digitalization as a driver of servitization towards digitally-enabled product-service systems (PSS). These systems call for new business models and value co-creation for the development and delivery of value propositions. However, the success of a PSS strategy is dependent on the involved actors. Market segmentation is a process of examining and grouping customers and targeting them with specific value propositions. Companies can then benefit from a better understanding of customer needs and a differentiated marketing strategy that leads to competitive advantages. It seems that market segmentation could support the creation of digitally-enabled PSS. However, there seems to be only scarce literature that builds a connection between the two research fields. Therefore, this paper uses a semi-systematic literature review to identify and apprise the state of knowledge. Of the ten papers found to be relevant, only one paper can answer the research question fully. The results show a clear research gap. Nonetheless, the analysis indicates that the topic of market segmentation is often discussed in combination with value co-creation. Examining segmentation in this context could further the understanding of how a digitally-enabled PSS architecture based on market segmentation can improve an industrial business-to-business (B2B) company’s competitive position.

Small and medium-sized enterprises often face resource deficits and therefore depend on cooperating with other actors to stay innovative in a competitive environment. Establishing and maintaining actual co-creation and service interaction strategies however is challenging. A reason for this is the complexity of finding methodologies and tools to create valuable outcome and the lack of knowledge of collaboration toolsets, also in virtual environments. This paper introduces an Innovation-Method-Framework consisting of innovation methods for increased service interaction and value co-creation among service stakeholders. Also, toolsets for the framework’s practical application are provided.

In the scientific literature and in practice, quite a lot of attention is paid to the actors’ network analysis in living labs. Still, there is a lack of studies on value exchange between different actors in living laboratories. This study selected the distributed structure of the actors’ network in living lab since most European residential laboratories function according to this model. In the course of this exploratory study, we conducted two workshops: the first with participants from several European residential laboratories to discuss and co-design a framework for analyzing the exchange of value between different stakeholders, and the second workshop—case study, where the proposed framework was applied on the actors network of the existed living laboratory—KTH Live-in-Lab. As a result, we got a detailed picture of the network of actors and value exchange within the value co-creation model for KTH Live-in-Lab (Smart Home Services project).

Researchers are building increasing competence in the area of servitization with respect to manufacturing and more recently digital servitization. A much smaller volume of work considers the value of servitization for service organizations and ecosystems, despite early recognition that servitization is applicable to service providers, manufacturers, and other actors such as distributors. This provides an opportunity to move beyond manufacturing to explore how servitization applies and manifests in service providers. The paper uses concepts from Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) and Service Science and focuses on key business activities undertaken by actors in an ecosystem and considers them for independent service providers (ISPs); that is, not companies acting as distributors for manufacturers’ products. Thus, this paper builds a research agenda for this embryonic research area, combining key strands of existing manufacturer-based research and applying them to a service provider context. We consider how the characteristics of ISPs might lead to differences to manufacturer-focused servitization. We use exemplar vignettes to bring some of these issues to life and illustrate how ISPs may be better placed than manufacturers to address these key business activities to implement servitization.

The transformation process from a product-oriented company to a service-oriented company is known as servitization. The following research focuses on how a shared understanding of servitization can be enhanced through the application of business model design methods and discusses the role of co-creation in this process. The continuous adaptation of the business model is crucial to move from the exploration phase to the engagement phase in the servitization process and to overcome the tipping points between these two phases through a common understanding and conviction. The research at hands ads to literature as it discusses how a business model analysis, and the applied methods support the development of a shared understanding.