Orthogonal Views on Product/Service-System Design in an entire Industry Branch

Product/Service-Systems (PSS) is an emerging research area, with terms such as ‘functional sales’, ‘servicizing’ and ‘service engineering’ all contributing to the foundation and our current understanding of PSS as a phenomenon. The field is still in its formative stages and definitions, understandings and approaches to PSS are still fluid. Much of the literature in the field of PSS has, until now, focused largely on the actual transition from product to PSS and has typically resided in the field of engineering design. Symptomatic of the current literature is the concept of service as the adding-on of non-physical activities and relationships between supplier and customer. There is evidence in the literature, that multi-stakeholder approaches, customer activity understanding, actor-network charting and value chain collaboration are important factors to include in PSS strategies. However, actual case examples of these factors are sparse and limited to conceptual examples. This paper describes five orthogonal views on PSS design, fostering integrated product/service thinking across organisational boundaries, via a systematic approach to user-oriented product and service development.