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The study aims to explore the benefits of service productisation to provide further understanding on the productisation concept as support for business processes and service management. The concept has been deficiently discussed regardless of the potential significance to the whole formed by service products, business processes, information technology (IT), people and data.

In the study, the exploratory empirical evidence is presented from 16 cases, 4 of which are from companies that are globally well-known.

The key findings of the paper include an overview of the benefits of service productisation and the relation to service offering, service processes and related resources. The concept links to the management of the whole formed by service products, business processes, IT, people and data. The noted benefits seem to be applicable to productisation of different service types, whilst some service characteristics may affect the specific emphasis.

The limitations involve using secondary data, which, however, makes the cases less biased regarding the aims. Primary data are required to gain further insights into the phenomena and the identified benefits.

The findings provide support for issues that are commonly discussed by practitioners on a concept that is less studied by the scientific literature. Practitioners can work towards organisational efficiency and effectiveness by understanding the benefits of productisation. Understanding service productisation can support the effective management of business processes and work towards prosperity in the service business.

The study is the first one to analyse the benefits of service productisation by exploring the issue through multiple cases and attempting to identify aspects for further attention by the academic community.

The previous literature has indicated that the productisation of services may play a role in service management, although a certain level of obscurity still surrounds the concept. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the meaning of service productisation (SP) as well as to contribute to a greater understanding of the concept.

An inductive analysis was applied to 13 instances of activities related to the productisation of services, with secondary data being analysed to identify practices relevant to SP and to examine their significance. The analysis is guided by an extensive literature review.

SP has been found to play a role in systematising and tangibilising a service offering and its related processes as well as in formalising the processes and service offerings. The potential elements of SP have been identified and supporting evidence has been provided. The findings indicate that SP has a specific focus on the offering and its related processes, with the aim being to create a service product that can be sold, delivered and invoiced. SP may utilise various practices and techniques, and customer orientation also plays a significant role. A typology of SP has been created by reflecting on its commercial and technical aspects.

This study has important implications for the service industry as it provides a structure and key considerations for productising services.

This study is one of the first to seek evidence for the concept of SP from multiple instances of SP as well as an extensive literature base. The typology created provides a context for discussing SP as well as reflecting on its commercial and technical aspects.

The purpose of this paper is to study the antecedents of service innovation success in the knowledge-intensive business services context, especially why the participation of frontline employees and multiple organizational units is not enough for succeeding in knowledge-intensive service productization.

A multiple-case study of two polar cases with longitudinal data, participant observation, and key personnel interviews.

Case evidence indicates that frontline employee participation and cross-unit collaboration are not sufficient antecedents for successful service productization. Instead, to facilitate employee knowledge sharing, managers need to align the project goals with the goals of participating employees, and promote trust among the project workgroup. Moreover, to enable effective cross-unit collaboration, managers need to facilitate the establishment of common vocabulary for productization work and services, and to resolve any emerging conflicts between participating organizational units.

The findings indicate the importance of enabling knowledge sharing and cross-unit collaboration for service productization. The identified antecedents translate to practical strategies for achieving these. The results also highlight the importance of bottom-up service innovation, and the management of service innovation on the group level.

The study indicates that common antecedents for successful service innovation may not be sufficient in the knowledge-intensive context, calling into question the assumptions about individual and group behavior in service innovation, and suggesting the importance of multi-level perspective on service innovation.

Productization, defined as the standardization of the production and delivery processes of services, is an approach that many service companies undertake, moving from relationship-intensive customer projects toward selling specific standardized offerings. In contrast to research on servitization, little in-depth research is available on the effects of this change of approach on the buyer-seller relationship. The purpose of this paper is to narrow this gap by providing evidence of the outcomes of productization in a corporate bank which has been serving Tier 1 customers for more than 15 years.

Using the IMP Group approach, this research identifies how productization affects buyer-seller relationships. In total, 37 key informant interviews were conducted on both sides of the buyer-seller relationship.

This research identified direct effects of productization relevant to buyer-seller relationships, and as many indirect effects through internal organizational processes. Productized service companies should develop their relationships with customers, by separating the standardization of the internal productization processes from the external relationship-based activities.

This paper contribute to the literature, exploring the long-term consequences of productization of services for the buyer-seller relationships.

This study aims to facilitate consistency of information in building information modelling (BIM) and address the current BIM gaps through the perspectives of the productization concept and product structure (PS).

The study follows a conceptual research approach in conjunction with a single case study. First, the previous studies on BIM implementation, productization and PS are reviewed. Further, a case study is used to analyse the current state of productization in the construction sector and develop a functional PS for construction.

A Part-Phase-Elements Matrix is proposed as a construction-specific PS to facilitate consistency in information and to enhance BIM. The proposed matrix provides new avenues to facilitate consistent information exchange through the interconnection between conceptual PS and standard building objects library, and encourage collaborative communication between stakeholders.

This study explores the core of the productization concept and PS as means to facilitate consistency of information and thus address the current gaps in BIM. This as building projects progressively move towards systematic modular and prefabricated construction where the flow of reliable information about product and construction offerings becomes increasingly important.

This paper aims to emphasize a research priority on the understanding of service products and how services can be productized. Furthermore, it provides perspectives on the contribution of service research to management practice and who should be the main target audience of service research.

This paper is based on the personal reflections of an author of two leading services marketing textbooks.

This paper develops three propositions related to service research. First, it advances that academic service research has neglected the important topic of productizing services and that service products should be treated as concrete units of deliverables to customers rather than something fuzzy of unspecified quantity. That is, service products should be developed, designed, specified, configured, modularized, bundled, tiered, branded, priced sold and delivered to customers. More research is needed on how organizations can do this. Second, this paper argues that academics frequently underestimate the significant contributions service research has made to management practice and details important contributions that originated from the service research community. Third, it is proposed that the main target audience of service research should not be the marketing, sales and service departments. Rather, it should be decision makers (especially C-level executives) across all functions who should develop a service perspective and service mindset.

This paper urges service researchers to focus on what are service products and how firm can create, manage and deliver them. Furthermore, it suggests that service researchers should be more confident and proud of the significant progress and contributions they have made to management practice over the past few decades. Finally, service researchers should tailor their messages for decisions makers of all organizational functions and departments in service organizations.

As a writer of five editions of a services marketing textbook, the author has sifted through three decades of service research. The reflections in this paper originate from this unique perspective.

The business-to-business (B2B) marketing literature is heavily focused on the manufacturing sector. However, it is the B2B service sector that shows the highest growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Beyond a vibrant stream of literature on servitization, the B2B literature has neglected drawing on the wider service literature. This paper aims to examine recent streams of service research that have promising implications and research opportunities for B2B marketing.

Together, the author team has decades of research, managerial and executive teaching experience related to B2B marketing and services marketing and management. The observations and reflections in this paper originate from this unique perspective and are supplemented by insights from 16 expert interviews.

The authors identify and discuss in this paper four broad and related themes from the service literature that can stimulate B2B research and practice. First, the authors highlight the implications for capturing value in economies with their rapidly increasing specialization and related growth in B2B services. Specifically, the authors explain where B2B firms should focus on to gain bargaining power in the value chains of the future. Second, an additional strategy to enhance a B2B firm’s power to capture value is servitization, which allows firms to get closer to their customers, increase their switching costs and build strategic partnerships. The authors explore how firms can use service productization to enhance their chances of successful servitization. Third, servitization is expensive, and productivity and scalability are often a challenge in B2B contexts. These issues are tackled in a recent service research stream on cost-effective service excellence (CESE) where the authors derive implications for B2B firms. Fourth and related to CESE, latest developments in intelligent automation offer exciting opportunities for B2B services to be made more scalable.

This paper is based on the unique perspective of the author team and a panel of experts and connects major streams of service research to the B2B literature.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain how different kinds of knowledge-intensive business service processes (KIBS processes) can be formalised without excessively limiting employees’ agency, and thus flexibility in value creation. Previous research acknowledges the need to balance flexibility and formalisation but does not investigate how employees achieve this balance in various types of KIBS processes.

This paper employs a qualitative multiple-case study approach to compare employees’ agency in six successful formalisation projects targeting different types of KIBS processes in three firms. Through a systematic mapping of employees’ agency across the cases, this study reveals alternative patterns of formalisation that enable agency.

The findings reveal notable differences in employees’ agency in the studied cases. When KIBS processes were scale intensive and/or the culture-favoured conformity, formalisation projects were centrally organised, and employees obeyed codified process templates, even though some agency remained. When KIBS processes were smaller scale and/or the culture-favoured freedom, employees conducted formalisation projects autonomously and retained higher levels of agency in formalised KIBS processes.

Firms and business units providing KIBS should choose their formalisation approaches locally based on the scalability of the KIBS process, their employees’ skill levels, knowledge bases and culture. Choosing the right approach enables flexibility while striving for efficient processes.

Previous studies suggest that formalisation benefits only some KIBS, but this comparative approach shows that a variety of KIBS processes benefit from formalisation if the formalisation approach is tailored to the context. Alternative patterns of formalisation are revealed to guide further empirical research on the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to organize and connect past research from different servitization-related scholarly communities.

This study reviews more than 1,000 articles by combining author co-citation and qualitative content analyses.

The structure and boundaries of the field are mapped, and the characteristics of the three identified servitization-related communities are assessed qualitatively. These three communities are product-service systems, solution business, and service science. The findings demonstrate that a narrow range of theories and qualitative methods dominate in existing research.

Through the lens of the sociology of science, this review critically evaluates servitization-related research and offers a list of themes that are considered important to the future development of the field. Regarding future research, the main recommendations are as follows: increasing the use of well-established theories from adjacent mature fields, borrowing ideas from different research communities to stimulate knowledge accumulation within and across communities, and reducing the level of description while increasing the number of confirmatory, quantitative, and longitudinal research designs. Finally, the development of formal structures for socialization (e.g. conferences and special issues) could allow the field to achieve a greater degree of scientific maturity and would influence the direction and pace of the development of servitization-related research.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how employees make sense of a structural change in a public organisation, in order to understand which practices form this change and how individual elements (rules, understandings etc.) may shape the process of such changes.

The research is based on: a two-wave interview method, where the same individuals from different levels of the organisation were questioned in both 2012 and 2014; and an analysis of the formal documents created during the decision-making process. Schatzki’s (1996) approach is used as the basis to identify teleo-affective structures, practical understandings and rules as constitutive elements of the practices that comprised the structural change in the organisation.

The analysis revealed two main practices – structural reorganisation and the sharing of information and involving employees – that shaped the process of structural change within the organisation. These practices are formed of positive and negative ways of doing, some of which have become in-house habits and a few which have become rules of the organisation. There were competing understandings and enactments of named elements in the organisation, indicating that organisational practices exist beyond individuals and that it takes a collective effort to change them.

The retrospective interview technique and use of employees’ subjective sense-making did not allow us to fully grasp how practices unfolded during the process of a change to the everyday workings of the organisation, which could only be accomplished by direct observations.

The research highlighted those processes that influence one of the potentially most important changes to any organisation, that of organisation structure – both extensive and compact – which has thus far seldom been studied. The authors empirically tested Schatzki’s (1996) approach to practices and provided a set of categories for analysing practices during such changes.