رقابت در بخش های B2B از طریق خدمات پرداخت به ازای استفاده Competing in business-to-business sectors through pay-per-use services

1. Introduction Newly emerging technologies (e.g. digitization, internet of things, industrial internet) and changing customer needs are altering the business environment in business-to-business sectors. Customer requirements increasingly go beyond operational needs and extend to strategic needs for ensuring customer success. Product companies in the business-tobusiness sector respond to such changes in the business environment by shifting from products to services. This shift has been conceptualized in various ways, including servitization, transition from products to services, service infusion, (industrial) product-service-systems (PSS), functional sales, integrated product service offerings, service-led growth, and/or hybrid offerings (e.g. Baines et al., 2009; Kowalkowski et al., 2015; Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003; Mont, 2002; Ulaga and Reinartz, 2011). The capability-view of sustaining competitive advantages suggests that companies can enhance competitive advantages in a specific business environment by developing operational capabilities into core competencies (Winter, 2003). Additionally, dynamic capabilities such as sensing opportunities and threats, seizing to take advantage of the sensed opportunities and fending off threats, and reconfiguring for maintaining competitiveness by modifying operational capabilities, enable companies to respond to changes in the business environment (Teece, 2007). Companies sense both the opportunities and threats associated with pay-per-use (PPU) services. They recognize the opportunity that customers only have to pay for the use of a product without buying the product itself. Companies also acknowledge the threat that customers with a low level of product usage are attracted by PPU services (Cusumano et al., 2015; Guajardo et al., 2012), making it difficult to explore fully the financial opportunities. Companies seize the sensed opportunities and fend off these threats through adapting the revenue mechanism from product revenue to payment for product usage (Kindström et al., 2013). Companies also reconfigure operational capabilities by developing new data processing capabilities to gain a deeper understanding of product usage and by altering product design capabilities to optimize service delivery costs, as well as PPU revenue throughout the product lifecycle (Ulaga and Reinartz, 2011).