The digital servitization of manufacturing: a literature review and a research agenda

The convergence of services and digital technologies is generating unprecedented opportunities in manufacturing, by adding value to products, allowing more efficient processes, and supporting improved managerial decisions with richer, faster and sounder information. Yet, despite its high relevance, there is still a lack of scientific knowledge regarding this phenomenon. We analyse the merging trends of manufacturing digitization and servitization with the main purpose to describe and explain if and how the evolving technological landscape facilitates, habilitates and supports manufacturing servitization. More specifically this paper aims to put the current knowledge on the topic into order. We present a systematic review of the scientific literature concerning how digital technologies enable servitization in manufacturing, as the first step of a research programme on how these two megatrends are jointly disrupting resources, competences, skills and consequently business models. We show that the knowledge about how digital technologies support service transformation in manufacturing is still at an early stage and rather limited. Then, key challenges and future research directions within this topic are highlighted