چه زمانی خدمات یک استراتژی رقابتی سودآور است؟  When is servitization a profitable competitive strategy?

1. Introduction In more competitive markets, manufacturers have begun to offer products with services in inseparable formats to gain a competitive advantage to survive the market. More manufacturers are providing their customers with an opportunity to obtain highly integrated services. The term servitization has been used in both academia and practice to capture this phenomenon in which manufacturing companies provide services as an important strategy (Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988). For example, Rolls-Royce now earns higher revenue not from selling aircraft engines but from providing services such as maintenance and repair. Adobe no longer only sells desktop applications to attract more customers. Creative Cloud by Adobe provides access to the latest versions of the company’s various programs as well as appropriate services for making the programs more efficient and valuable. Now the number of subscribers for Creative Cloud has increased up to almost 4 million (ProDesignTools, 2014) and the stock price has risen around 130% in the last 3 years. Xerox is no longer just a copier manufacturer but has transformed itself into a company that provides “document solutions” based on fees by copy machine usage. There are various definitions of servitization in the literature, with narrow or broad views. Vandermerwe and Rada (1988) coined the term servitization evolving in three stages: Stage 1 (goods or services), Stage 2 (goods and services), and Stage 3 (goods and services combined with support, knowledge, and self service). Robinson et al. (2002) defined servitization as the inextricably linked status of the core product and the service elements. Neely (2008) defined servitization as a firm’s capabilities and competencies that create mutual value not by selling products alone but by selling product-service systems (PSS). Quinn et al. (1989) explained that the services in the manufacturing industry are essential and not separate2 . As the economic environment changes, recently the servitization strategy is implemented under the situation that big data have a big role (Opresnik and Taisch, 2015). We examine product-level servitization rather than firm- or industry-level one. Servitized goods in this study are defined as goods integrated with and inseparable from services that have additional and supplementary characteristics such as maintenance, repair, and after-sales service for consumer convenience. Simon and Wuebker (1999) proposed various rationales for bundling: price discrimination, complexity cost reduction, economies of scope and scale, transaction cost reduction, among others.