Towards service-oriented business models: a survey of capital goods companies

Abstract

New trends for manufactures push towards selling the usage of the product ??? or even its performances ??? rather than its ownership. The phenomenon concerning the evolution from a ???traditional??? business model based on the product sales to new service-oriented business model have been discussed in literature since the ???90es (Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988; Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003; Tukker, 2004; Vargo & Lush, 2004; Kowalkowski et al., 2011). Despite this, a limited application of ???service-oriented??? business models has been observed in the capital goods sectors, especially within SMEs. This is due also to the lack of business model or model-based approach that guides companies in the servitization process: it seems there is a grey area for companies trying to achieve a successful ???transformation to services??? and to capture and create value through the provision of services, especially in terms of business models (Neely et al., 2011). The main aim of this study, that is a part of a large research project (T-REX) funded by the EC, is therefore to understand how business models of companies that operate in capital goods sector are configured and to analyse the diffusion of service-oriented business models. This paper presents the main result of an exploratory survey that was carried out among 95 European companies operating in the machinery, automation and forklift sectors. To support the empirical investigation, we developed a preliminary research framework, grounded on the Canvas model (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010), enriched with a set of variables that we specifically defined in order to describe the business model configuration in servitization contexts. Preliminary results show that business models are in general still product-oriented. Revenue models are dominated by product sales, with a contribution of services close to 20% due to corrective maintenance and spare part sales. Rental or ???Pay-per-x??? contracts are an almost negligible revenue source.