Rethinking Transition from Products to Services:A Physical Technology vs Social Technology Approach
It is now increasingly evident that product centric firms are attempting to move downstream to provide additional value-added services for revenues enhancement and competitive purposes. Firms therefore need to think about how their products would be used in users contexts in addition to innovation and production aspects. Formally, firms need to think about the service characteristics ( Gallouj and Weinstein 1997) of their products or artifacts in order to plan for a service strategy.This paper is a first attempt to provide a theoretical framework to analyze the transition from products to services. We adopted the physical technology vs. social technology( Nelson and Sampat 2001) framework to aid our theorizing. Physical technology refers to the actual implementation of a technology principle driven by the architectural aspect or its dominant design while social technology refers to the organizational aspects to carry out or coordinate the associated division of labors. A product architecture and the associated social technology as a holistic productive unit( Abern-athy and Utterback 1976) may become locked-in or optimized to each other over time.To deliver these service characteristics may involve new competencies of the manufacturers and the users, and may involve a change in how the products are structured; this in turn entails a corresponding change of the social technology coordinating a new set of distributed competencies. The evolution of social technology ( Nelson 2003), however, faces a difficult selection process; in other words, social technology is more difficult to be re-designed, tested and stabilized. In addition, the new social technology needs to attend to the customization and co-production ( Gadrey and Gallouj 1995) nature of service delivery which results in new sources of contingencies. Social technology may be a reverse salient ( Rosenberg 1976) for the transition to services.Overall, the tertiarization of industry entails re-conceptualizing artifacts in terms of service characteristics and firms may use a combination of product architectural changes and organizational changes to fa-cilitate this migration or service augmentation or to pursue other innovation modalities. Using this physical vs. social technology framework, we developed several general scenarios of such migration and discussed the role social technology can play to facilitate such transitions. We then examined the possible sources of e-conomy for the product to service transition and postulated strategies leveraging physical and social technology to facilitate such economies.
Kwok L.Shum
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,Hong Kong,China
国际会议
Academy of Innovation and Entrepreneurship 2008(创新与创业国际学术会议)
北京
英文
329-332
2008-03-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）