Leveraging the Value of Data in the Continuum of Products and Services: Business Types in the Function-Oriented Offerings Model

In the age of digitization and data-driven technologies, business models around physical products, regardless of whether smartphone or industrial printing machine, are not limited to sale or the offering of accompanying services like maintenance contracts. Rather, new offerings regard the product itself already as a platform for value creation, thus making it an integral part of overarching data ecosystems. Customers thus begin to value the utility of service rather than possessing a product. This study focusses the liaison between product and service from the rather unexplored perspective of networked functionality. We introduce the functions-oriented offerings model as an operatable abstraction that determines data-driven offerings as an individual configuration that is drawn from a solution space between product functions and services and creates individual value. Even though practice preaches dominant business types for data-driven ecosystems such as platform providers, our successive permutative analysis suggests multiple viable business types for future data ecosystems.