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The purpose of this paper is to articulate the challenges of learning and improving in service delivery systems – that present managers with imperfect information, confounded variables, and tightly coupled interactions between operational and psychological factors – and present a simulator to assist managers to overcome these challenges.

After reviewing the literature on “learning from simulations” and the main challenges of learning in a service environment, the paper presents the assumptions underlying the service quality management simulator, its interface, and protocols to use it that have proven effective.

It is possible to assist managers to develop operational understanding – what to do, when and how much of it to do – about the drivers of service quality using a simulation environment.

In its present form, the simulator only takes a functional definition of service quality and captures the relationships in a business‐to‐consumer service environment. These shortcomings suggest future expansions to the theory. Also, while anecdotal evidence is reported of the benefits using the simulator, quantifying these benefits remains a challenge for future research.

The ability to customize the simulator's parameters to represent specific service settings makes it a powerful tool for operating managers facing some of the challenges described by the theory.

This paper documents, in a non‐technical way, the elements a set of relationships that has been shown to confuse managers and cause erosion of service quality and describes the simulator's uses and benefits in a pedagogical environment.

Management literature is almost unanimous in suggesting to manufacturers that they should integrate services into their core product offering. The literature, however, is surprisingly sparse in describing to what extent services should be integrated, how this integration should be carried out, or in detailing the challenges inherent in the transition to services. Reports on a study of 11 capital equipment manufacturers developing service offerings for their products. Focuses on identifying the dimensions considered when creating a service organization in the context of a manufacturing firm, and successful strategies to navigate the transition. Analysis of qualitative data suggests that the transition involves a deliberate developmental process to build capabilities as firms shift the nature of the relationship with the product end‐users and the focus of the service offering. The report concludes identifying implications of our findings for further research and practitioners.

The growth of firms is fundamentally based on selfreinforcing feedback loops, one of the most important of which involves cash flow.When profit margin is positive, sales generate cash, which may then be reinvested to finance the operating cash cycle.We analyze simulations of a sustainable growth model of a generic new venture to assess the importance of taxes, and regulatory costs in determining growth.The results suggest that new ventures are particularly vulnerable to public policy effects, since their working capital resource levels are minimal, and they have few options to raise external funds necessary to fuel their initial operating cash cycles.Clearly, this has potential consequences in terms of gaining competitive advantage from experience effects, word of mouth, scale economies, etc. The results of this work suggest that system dynamics models may provide public policy-makers a cost-effective means to meet the spirit of the U.S. Regulatory Flexibility Act

The purpose of this paper is to organize and connect past research from different servitization-related scholarly communities.

This study reviews more than 1,000 articles by combining author co-citation and qualitative content analyses.

The structure and boundaries of the field are mapped, and the characteristics of the three identified servitization-related communities are assessed qualitatively. These three communities are product-service systems, solution business, and service science. The findings demonstrate that a narrow range of theories and qualitative methods dominate in existing research.

Through the lens of the sociology of science, this review critically evaluates servitization-related research and offers a list of themes that are considered important to the future development of the field. Regarding future research, the main recommendations are as follows: increasing the use of well-established theories from adjacent mature fields, borrowing ideas from different research communities to stimulate knowledge accumulation within and across communities, and reducing the level of description while increasing the number of confirmatory, quantitative, and longitudinal research designs. Finally, the development of formal structures for socialization (e.g. conferences and special issues) could allow the field to achieve a greater degree of scientific maturity and would influence the direction and pace of the development of servitization-related research.