Despite the growing prevalence of servitization for manufacturers, extant studies caution that servitization may not always produce competitive advantage and can fail to outperform product-centric manufacturing strategies. Previous research has identified factors that explain servitization success, including types of servitized offerings, organizational characteristics, and environmental characteristics. Yet, there are three gaps in the literature. First, the extant studies commonly investigate antecedents of different types of services in isolations. These studies show that services supporting the product (SSPs) and services supporting the customer (SSCs) have different antecedents and outcomes. It is also suggested that SSPs provide a stepping-stone for a successful servitized business model, where manufacturers can grow by adding SSCs to their service portfolio. Therefore, the higher degree of servitization can be characterized by pursuing both SSPs and SSCs. However, little is known about antecedents of pursuing these servitized offerings synchronously. Second, extensive research suggested that specific service-oriented resources and capabilities are required to drive servitization beyond product-oriented capabilities. This stream of research has mainly examined the net effects of specific capabilities in isolation, which leaves an unanswered question regarding interdependencies and interplay among such organizational capabilities. This is problematic as prior management studies stress the potential synergetic effects of different capabilities. Third, many studies have examined environmental determinants (e.g., competitive intensity) of successful servitization, but they are limited to investigating the role of environmental conditions as control variables or isolated interaction effects. Scant attention is given to how manufacturers orchestrate and leverage their capability sets to offer specific types of services across different environmental conditions. This represents an important gap as the alignment of strategy and structure on the one hand and environmental characteristics on the other have been shown to be critical for driving firm performance.

Our study takes these considerations as the starting point and aims to uncover performance-enhancing configurations of different servitized offerings (i.e., SSPs and SSCs), organizational resources (i.e., captured by firm size), service-oriented capabilities (i.e., service innovation, customization, and digitalization capabilities), and environmental characteristics (i.e., competitive intensity). We employed the fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) approach as it helps to understand causal complexity, including conjunctural, equifinal, and asymmetric configurations of antecedent conditions. Based on data from 151 manufacturers, our findings offers several contributions. First, we show that not all manufacturers achieve increased financial performance by synchronous pursuit of SSPs and SSCs. Second, manufacturers should leverage different service-oriented capabilities aligned with environmental conditions to successfully pursue both SSPs and SSCs. For instance, leveraging customization capability is sufficient condition regardless of the presence of other capabilities to drive firm performance in the case of large-sized manufacturer in competitive environment offering both SSPs and SSCs. Leveraging service innovation capability becomes more critical for large-sized firms in the absence of digitalization capability. Small-sized manufacturers in competitive environments benefit from synergy between all three service oriented capabilities to offer both SSPs and SSCs. Therefore, we provide new insights for academics and practitioners by unpacking performance-enhancing constellations of organizational and environmental conditions when manufacturers pursue both SSPs and SSCs.

Organizations and their management, as part of society, are influenced by gender. The same is true for strategic change and change management. This paper argues that servitization, as the transformational process from a product-oriented to a service-oriented business logic, also intersects with gender. However, servitization research has not considered the diverse ways in which gender influences values, behaviours and practices. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the potential of gender-in-management research to expand our knowledge and understanding of the service transformation in manufacturing companies.
Gender is conceptualized in two ways in management research. One stream of research considers gender a fixed category of the individual. In this logic, the gender of people involved in the servitization process influences decision making, leadership styles and their approach to innovation and change. Specifically, research based on upper echelons theory has found that top management teams’ gender diversity influences the quality of decisions and fosters strategic change and a growth orientation. As a growth strategy and strategic change process, servitization decisions are likely influenced by decision makers’ gender diversity as well. Furthermore, research has shown that men and women tend to display different types of leadership and management styles, with women more prone to transformational leadership. While research on leadership in servitization is scarce, decentralization and cross-functional cooperation and communication are highly relevant for servitization success. These aspects might be easier to accomplish with more “feminized” approaches to management. It has been argued that women often find it easier to innovate and to disrupt traditional structures, partly due to their experience of being marginalized. The business model innovation from products to services is not easy and often met with resistance. Women and other marginalized groups could therefore act as change agents to facilitate servitization.
Another stream of research views gender as a social practice. From this viewpoint, masculinities and femininities are performed and (re)produced in organizational cultures, leading to a gendering of management practices and processes. In this logic, gender influences the meaning, values and practices and therefore management processes of the organizations in which servitization takes place. A cultural transformation from product-orientation to service-orientation is necessary for successful servitization. Cultural change, however, can be undermined by existing power elites. Powerful organizational actors are, still, mostly male, leading to organizational cultures dominated by hegemonic masculinity. Masculine values and behaviour are argued to be more connected to production and transaction-based cultures, while services relate to relationality and a concern for customer needs, which are values considered as feminine.
Understanding how gender influences practices and culture related to servitization adds a new, so far neglected, dimension to servitization research, emphasizing the importance of the human factor, decision making, leadership and cultural transformation. These elements are potentially critical for successful servitization, which is not always easily achieved by manufacturing companies. This paper adds to servitization research by formulating concrete future research propositions. It helps management of servitizing organizations be cognizant of potentially hidden, gender related barriers to, or enablers of, successful servitization.

A servitization process includes four macro-stages, namely, exploration, engagement, expansion and exploitation, and progressing through these macro stages is fairly structured and unilateral (Baines et al., 2020). Within these macro-stages, however, we see many subprocesses, which are organic, unstructured and iterative (Kowalkowski et al., 2012; Martinez et al., 2017). Customer problem definitions are often unclear and change over time (Biggemann et al., 2013). Also, firms need to deal with the dynamic environment in which servitization occurs (Parida et al., 2019). Hence, to navigate the servitization process, firms need to be flexible. Despite the need for flexibility, many firms still use linear plan-based approaches such as stage-gate (Sjödin et al., 2020). Instead, servitization requires agility, which means applying previous knowledge while learning from current experiences (Jyothi & Rao, 2012). Besides Sjödin et al. (2020), there is little research investigating the effectiveness of agile approaches in a servitization context. Therefore, we answer the following research question: What is the efficacy of an agile approach for servitization?

This paper investigates agile development and lean start-up as two complementary agile methods (Edison et al., 2015; Ghezzi & Cavallo, 2020). Even though the two approaches are closely related, agile development focuses on how to develop valuable output, while lean start-up focuses on what output would be valuable. We conceptualize both agile development and lean start-up as multi-dimensional capabilities. Agile development consists of team autonomy, team diversity, iterative and incremental development and agile communication (Malik et al., 2021). Lean start-up comprises customer orientation, hypothesis testing, iterative experimentation, validation and learning (Harms & Schwery, 2020). To test their effectiveness in a servitization context, we relate both agile approaches to service business performance (Oliva et al., 2012).

We conducted survey research and used the validated measurement scales of Harms and Schwery (2020), Malik et al. (2021) and Oliva et al. (2012). After controlling for firm size, performance and industry, initial results from regression analysis (N = 50) do not show a correlation between lean start-up and service business performance (β = -.071, α > 0.1). This result might be explained by firms partially implementing lean startup or by lean startup being less effective in established firms compared to nascent firms (Chesbrough & Tucci, 2020). Another explanation may be a lack of power. Hence, we plan to collect more data and conduct further analysis.

In contrast to our results on the effect of lean startup, we found some evidence of a moderate positive correlation between agile development and service business performance (β = .465, α<0.05). Our findings suggest that agile development benefits service profitability and customer collaboration and extend the works of Baines et al. (2020) and Martinez et al. (2017). These works call for the development of prescriptive transformation frameworks that can cope with the emergent character of the servitization journey. We found that firms can effectively manage the unstructured and illogical subprocesses within the four servitization macro-processes by implementing agile development practices. So, instead of developing a detailed roadmap upfront, servitizing firms should plan for the unexpected.