Toward Service-based Value Creation: The Role of Service Business Development in Manufacturing Companies

Over the past decade, society has witnessed an increasing expansion of service economies as manufacturing (i.e., product-oriented) companies break free from their product-based business model and move toward more service-oriented value creation as a result of several economic, technological, and social changes. As they shift from products to (service) solutions, manufacturing companies pursue new strategic direction, inter alia, by extensively employing service business development activities.

The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the considerable (re-)emerging stream of service business development by providing vital insights for academia and management into important focus areas that have hardly, if at all, been (empirically) investigated in the existing literature before. Therefore, these findings can be vital to informing a differentiation in current and future marketing strategies in business practice.

First of all, this dissertation focuses on the extent to which service business development is transposed into business practice. Because scarce empirical-quantitative research has studied the current state of service business development across various industry and market sectors, this study analyzes a unique, manually collected dataset of 266 (product and service) business development activities. In so doing, this investigation contributes to literature by presenting a comprehensive, industry-wide status quo and trend report of service business development in practice.

Furthermore, given the surprisingly limited scientific attention paid to the question of how service business development is strategically configured and further applied to different environmental circumstances, this dissertation provides comprehensive theoretical and practical implications by analyzing in detail a sample of 137 service business developments of 66 product-oriented companies.

Lastly, manufacturers are recognizing that service-oriented value creation is moving toward a more collaborative process of co-creation as a promising measure to achieve competitive advantage, and even more as an appropriate response to complex business environments. Thus, an increasing number of companies around the world have recently introduced business models related to access-based services such as car-, scooter-, and bike-sharing systems. But despite the considerable advantages of access-based services as an alternative to ownership, these companies are now seeing that consumer adoption and (re-)usage rates remain insufficient. Owing to the lack of general and cross-national scientific knowledge, the purpose of this dissertation continues to explore which factors impede diffusion of related service business development activities from a consumer perspective and what kind of differences can be established between countries. Consequently, with a total of 1,443 participants, a cross-national survey was carried out in three countries, i.e., the United States, Germany, and China, to measure a vast number of different adoption barriers derived from a developed integrated framework that combines established theories within innovation and adoption behavior research.