Interplay between offering, provider and customer in product-service system design
Year: 2013
Editor: Udo Lindemann, Srinivasan V, Yong Se Kim, Sang Won Lee, John Clarkson, Gaetano Cascini
Author: Ritola, Tuomas; Coatanéa, Eric
Series: ICED
Institution: Aalto University, Finland
Page(s): 319-328
ISBN: 978-1-904670-47-6
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Customer value creation is pivotal for a company in order to be able to create value for their shareholders. Product-service systems (PSS) offer new ways for creating added value in comparison to selling traditional products with added services. The goal in this article is to study a product-service system design project and identify different interactions in the three dimensions of product-service systems – the offering, the provider, and the user/customer. Being able to identify interactions between the design elements in the three PSS dimensions would advance our understanding about PSS development in general and facilitate designing higher-value product-service systems. The research utilizes first-hand data of an availability-oriented reverse vending machine design project undergone in the research group during 2011-2012. The research resulted in identifying concrete interactions with potentially complex dynamics between the elements from the three dimensions. The interactions between the dimensions play an important role in PSS development, they may provide interesting openings for value creation, and they definitely deserve more attention and further research in the domain.
Keywords: Product/service systems, design engineering, value