Developing industrial smart product-service systems: Opportunities and challenges for manufacturing firms

Smart product-service systems (sPSS) with their cross-disciplinary nature offer great potential for manufacturing firms, however, at the same time, their complexity poses challenges that require a set of capabilities to address. This paper analyzes the opportunities and challenges perceived by manufacturing firms when developing sPSS through a multiple-case analysis. It focuses on the individual development strands of sPSS, namely product, data and service, and describes the interplay between them regarding the mainly technological challenges faced by the participating firms. The results are presented using a sPSS maturity framework that represents three development approaches and their respective perceived opportunities and challenges.