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This paper is premised upon an analysis of 26 cities within the UK regarding their smart city projects. Each city was analyzed through news articles, reports and policy documents to ascertain the level of each city's development as a smart city. Each was coded by separating the projects into five types, which were ranked on a scale from 0 (no plans for use) to 5 (project type in use). The most common types are the provision of open data and the creation of business ecosystems as the primary driver of the smart city. However, many councils and enterprises proclaim smartness before the technology is actually in use, making it difficult to separate what is utilised and what is under development. Therefore, this paper further carried out an analysis of 20 cities and their intended plans to usher in the smart city, to observe the expected emergence of smart city technology. This was achieved by interrogating various roadmaps and policy documents produced by the respective cities. It was found that the most prevalent form of emergent smart city technology is the rollout of 5G and increased educational programmes alongside a proliferation of internet of things and electric vehicle usage.

The adoption of the product‐service system business model means that the designing company has greater scope and motivation to learn from experience of its products in use to improve their core design and engineering capabilities. Continuous improvement, however, depends crucially upon the implementation of effective knowledge and information management (KIM) systems within a dynamic learning environment that impinge on diverse communities throughout the product lifecycle. This paper aims to address these issues.

This paper consolidates literature reviews and presents empirical observations relating to the current KIM systems and practices within large aerospace and manufacturing companies. In particular, experiences from a case study to enhance reuse of in‐service feedback conducted with an aerospace company are reported.

The empirical observations suggest that the feedback processes rely on a combination of formal and informal personalization and codification approaches, but companies are placing greater emphasis on the development of information systems to support learning from in‐service experience. It is argued that greater value could be realized from collective reuse of in‐service information but should be considered from the outset such that its content and representation could be made more amenable to computational analysis and organization for knowledge discovery.

To achieve the full aspirations of learning from in‐service experience, issues and challenges of KIM need to be addressed. These are summarized as strategies to promote success of codification approaches.

The initial value of the techniques for improving in‐service information reuse has been demonstrated to the industrial collaborator.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the information that manufacturing companies have available when competitively bidding for service contracts.

A semi-structured interview study was undertaken with industrialists in various sectors, which are currently facing the issue of servitisation.

One of the main findings was that, despite the novelty of the process, the decision makers at the competitive bidding stage have an understanding of the involved uncertainties. In particular, the uncertainty arising from the customer as the user of the product and evaluator of the competitive bids in addition to the uncertainty connected to the competitors were identified as the main influences on the pricing decision.

The research implications show the influences and considerations during the decision-making process at the competitive bidding stage for service contracts. These include the customer and the competitors.

Shortcomings in the current industrial practice were identified such as the approaches used to communicate the cost estimate for the service contract. The approaches currently used contradict research findings in the area of communicating uncertainty information, which means that further research is to be done to identify optimal approaches to displaying the uncertainty connected to the communicated information.

This paper offers a basis for research to understand the challenges industry faces when competitively bidding for service contracts. This can be used to develop novel approaches in supporting the decision maker such as a model that presents the probability of winning in comparison to the probability of making a profit.