Internet of things technologies, digital servitization and business model innovation in BtoB manufacturing firms

By Marco Paiola, Heiko Gebauer. 2020

393 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) are offering new opportunities and posing serious challenges to firms, forcing them to create entirely new business models, migrating from the conventional product-centric approaches to (digitally-based) service-oriented ones. This paper – following a qualitative research method – aims at describing the service-oriented impact of IoT technologies on firms' business models, with a particular focus on opportunities and challenges for BtoB manufacturing firms. Being the impact of IoT technologies on businesses a quite recent research stream, to date scarce attention has been devoted to the topic with specific attention to its impact on service-oriented business models in manufacturing firms. The paper contributes in this research stream in different ways. It proposes a map of digital servitization that helps in understanding firms' strategic transitions caused by technologies, making both theoretical and managerial contributions. Firstly, the research underlines the impact of the firms' sales model as a strategic factor in shaping firms' digital servitization strategies. In addition, three progressive levels of digital servitization complexity are identified, namely product- process- and outcome-oriented, that are based on an increasing use of IOT technologies and have specific challenges and opportunities.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c295d7a72ee5307aa53548686e7688441c03760

Citations in the corpus

• Exploring the impact of big data analytics capabilities on business model innovation: The mediating role of entrepreneurial orientation (2021, neutral): “…nature of EO is coherent with both the perspectives through which BMI can be analysed and achieved (i.e. the evolutive and the disruptive views; Paiola & Gebauer, 2020), though it better fits with BM radical innovations which require a higher level of entrepreneurship (S. Schneider & Spieth,…”
• Navigating disruptive crises through service-led growth: The impact of COVID-19 on Italian manufacturing firms (2020, neutral): “…are generally long-term processes (e.g., Tronvoll, Sklyar, Sörhammar, & Kowalkowski, 2020) that should have a deliberate impact on the business model of the firm (Paiola & Gebauer, 2020), which is fundamentally different from the measures urgently needed for businesses to recover from the pandemic.”