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Given the emergence of servitization as a viable strategy for manufacturers to gain a competitive advantage, determining what factors influence effective servitization is imperative. Drawing on organizational change and leadership theories, the purpose of this paper is to identify the leadership styles required for successfully implementing servitization in Japan.

Via stratified sampling method, 5,000 Japanese manufacturers registered in the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry were selected for participation in a mail survey. Survey data from 187 responding CEOs were matched with firm-level archival data, after which the matched data were analyzed.

The findings indicated that industry type is important in implementing servitization, but firm size and performance are not. The results also revealed that charismatic leadership style is especially critical in implementing and elevating servitization, whereas autocratic and autonomous leadership styles impede this process.

The study fills a gap in the literature by identifying a notable relationship between leadership style and servitization. Because the study was conducted in an Asian economic context, which has received less attention in servitization research, it advances the existing body of research on servitization by breaking the former geographical constraints in this field of studies.

This study presents practical implications for Japanese manufacturers who wish to devise a strategic leadership plan in the servitization process. CEOs of the firms can initiate the transition to servitization by employing charismatic leadership skills and convincing employees of the benefits of the change.

The research is distinguished from existing studies in that it provides the first empirical evidence on effective CEO leadership styles for servitization in Japanese manufacturing firms.

This chapter reviews the literature on servitization to understand whether and how mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been dealt with and what the portrayed consequences are of servitization through M&As. Servitization refers to how manufacturing firms extend and remodel their offerings to focus on value in use rather than product transfer. The rationale of the chapter follows from how business model innovation or business modeling has been predicted as the next M&A wave, while the focus on servitization has been pronounced in research and practice as a means for manufacturing firms to refocus operations during the past decade. The chapter concludes that while the servitization literature is vibrant, the mode of reaching service competence and renewing business is not well explored in the literature. In line with the predicted next M&A wave, servitization through M&As would thereby create an interesting path for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the servitization knowledge base from an organizational change perspective, identifying developed, developing and undeveloped topics to provide a platform that directs future research.

This paper addresses three objectives: it comprehensively examines organizational change management literature for selection of a theoretical framework; it classifies extant studies within the framework through a systemic literature review; and it analyses 232 selected papers and proposes a research agenda.

Analysis suggests increasing global awareness of the importance of services to manufacturers. However, some topics, especially related to servitization transformation, remain undeveloped.

Although the authors tried to include all publications relevant to servitization, some might not have been captured. Evaluation and interpretation relied on the research team and subsequent research workshops.

One of the most significant challenges for practitioners of servitization is how to transform a manufacturing organization to exploit the opportunity. This paper consolidates literature regarding servitization, identifying progress concerning key research topics and contributing a platform for future research. The goal is to inform research to result eventually in a roadmap for practitioners seeking to servitize.

Although extant reviews of servitization identify themes that are examined well, they struggle to identify unanswered questions. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on servitization as a process of organizational change.

The article consolidates the servitization knowledge base from an industrial equipment manufacturing firm's performance perspective. This conceptual review is offering an integration of the extant literature. The authors identified various advanced services impacting a firm's overall revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. This paper provides a conceptual framework for industrial manufacturers' basic and advanced services to understand their relationship with various performance parameters. This study also provides a direction for future research with individual advanced services and their value cocreation with customers.

This study aims to develop a systematic method called servitization maturity model to support companies in developing distinctive capabilities for successful servitization.

The concept of maturity models is adopted to support companies in developing distinctive capabilities for servitization. A systematic literature review and case study approach are employed to develop the maturity model.

The findings highlight 46 capabilities classified into seven categories: strategy and leadership, performance, offerings, customers, organization, network and digital technology. Furthermore, the evolutionary path is defined by combining two types of levels, i.e. capability and maturity levels, to develop these capabilities.

The evolutionary path was partially validated through the application, while further investigation is required to validate the evolutionary path. Therefore, future research should investigate the further validation of the evolutionary path by conducting multiple case studies.

The proposed maturity model enables companies to not only capture the bigger picture of the required capabilities without oversight, but also determine a process for improving the requisite capabilities with feasible efforts.

Existing maturity models focused on the transition from less to more advanced services. However, recent studies emphasized that companies need to determine strategies that reflect their capabilities rather than simply move toward more advanced services. Based on this assumption, this study provides successive stages that enable companies to improve their capabilities through feasible efforts.

The aim of this study is to gain important insights on integration oriented servitization identifying essential dimensions of effective structures, coordination approaches and management controls adopted by manufacturing firms that integrate forward towards distribution, sales and services.

The study adopts a theory-guided qualitative abductive methodology to conduct a comparative case-study of two manufacturing firms in the same industry integrating forward to enhance servitization but with significantly different performance outcomes. The findings are uncovered from a broad spectrum of primary and secondary data spanning two decades.

The consistently high-performing firm puts equal emphasis on production and downstream distribution, sales and services and motivate individuals to engage in entrepreneurial efforts to develop combined product-services offerings that are valued by customers. The underperforming firm prioritizes operating efficiency driven by engineering prowess and managed through planning, standardization, authority and central controls.

The study is based on two representative firms operating in a specific industry context, which has ramifications for the generalizability of results and calls for replication studies to substantiate and extend findings.

Forward integration from manufacturing into distribution, sales and services represents a specific servitization strategy that needs structure and particular coordination approaches to be effective in complex dynamic product-markets. The characteristics of the outperforming case company provide useful insights on effective integrated servitization efforts.

Forward integration is a commonly adopted strategy among manufacturing firms that constitute the backbone of modern economies and effective governance of these integration oriented servitization efforts has important implications for societal value creation.

This study builds on rationales from management science including economic theory, corporate strategy and different micro-foundational lenses and thereby hone recent calls for broader theoretical foundations to enlighten studies of the servitization puzzle.

This research bridges disparate research on servitization, namely product–service systems (PSS) and integrated solutions (IS), to provide valuable insights for the progression of the field. It acts as a reconciliation of these research streams and offers a reconceptualised agenda incorporating recent research on platforms, ecosystems, modularity, risk and governance as key conceptual themes to synthesise and build theory.

This is a conceptual, theory development article focused on advancing thinking on servitization by identifying systematic and theoretically informed research themes. It also proposes future research opportunities to advance theoretical contributions and practical implications for servitization research.

By reviewing and synthesising extant PSS and IS research, this article identified five core themes – namely modularity, platforms, ecosystems, risks and governance. The importance of these five themes and their linkages to PSS and IS are examined and a theoretical framework with a future research agenda to advance servitization is proposed.

This paper considers the similarities and differences between PSS and IS in order to develop a theory and to reconcile formerly disparate research efforts by establishing linkages between core themes and identifying valuable synergies for scholars. The importance of the core themes and current gaps within and across these themes are shown, and a mid-range theory for servitization is positioned to bridge the servitization-related PSS and IS communities.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the internet of things (IoT) contributes to manufacturers' advanced services development and delivery. To better understand the creation of these IoT contributions, the study adopts a socio-technical research perspective, which expands the scope of the investigation and integrates the technological, information and social factors that enable these IoT contributions.

A multiple-case research method was employed to investigate the IoT contribution scenarios of 15 manufacturers who offer advanced services and to examine their dependence on other non-IoT factors, using thematic analysis.

The analysis identified five advanced services value propositions, which are enabled by nine “IoT-enabled information systems (IS) artefacts” that specify the distinct interactions between the technological, information and social subsystems supporting the manufacturers' advanced services value propositions.

The study advances the servitisation research by demonstrating that IoT technology on its own is insufficient for the creation of the IoT contributions. It shows, instead, the need for close interactions with a diverse range of other factors, which are often not considered when developing an IoT strategy. The study also introduces the IS artefact notion as a unit of analysis that constitutes an alternative to the commonly adopted techno-centric perspective used to conceptualise IoT contributions. The study and its findings add to the development of a socio-technical perspective on the IoT in advanced services and thereby suggests a number of theoretical and practical implications.

This study theoretically articulates and empirically validates a model of relationships between market complexity (competition intensity, heterogeneity and technological change), strategic focus on product and service differentiation, ADS offerings and differentiation advantage.

The authors develop and test hypotheses through structural equation modeling based on data from the Sixth International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS-VI), involving 931 manufacturers from 22 countries.

The results indicate that (1) market complexity has a positive impact on strategic focus on product and service differentiation; (2) focus on product and service differentiation, but not market complexity, has a positive impact on the extent to which business units offer ADS to their customers; (3) ADS have a positive impact on service differentiation advantage, but no influence on product differentiation advantage.

Managers should incorporate decisions related to ADS provision as part of their manufacturing strategy formulation processes to align markets, strategic focus on product and service differentiation, and ADS provision. ADS seem an appropriate lever for market differentiation, because they appear not only to support service differentiation advantage, but also to be consistent with strategic focus on product differentiation.

The study provides novel insights and large-scale empirical evidence on the influence of the market environment on the offering of ADS, as well as on how relationships between the product and service activity in the manufacturing organization may affect differentiation advantage.

This paper explores the process used to communicate public policy in political campaigns. Empirical research has been conducted into determining the voters' consideration of the importance of national political issues and the association of the electorate's consideration of the importance of issues with identification with parties in the UK. This paper attempts to show how political parties can position themselves on the basis of issue stances when targeting groups of voters. A model is suggested to aid in public policy evaluation with implications for positioning; recognising that those parties that formed the previous government have significant advantages over the opposition during the conduct of electoral campaigns since they can make use of the government's communication networks. However, the paper looks at this process from a party‐oriented perspective (where issues are used more to persuade the electorate) rather than a candidate‐centred perspective (where personalities tend to be used more). Thus, further research needs to be conducted in order to ascertain the model's suitability in and adaptability for candidate‐driven political markets.