R&D Servitization in the Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

The shift to a service economy by transforming social structure has become a global phenomenon. This shift affects research and development (R&D) organizations. The literature on innovation research and R&D management is rooted mainly in product development based on technology themes. The modern service marketing literature introduces a service-dominant logic (S-D logic) perspective which does not separate services from goods. This paper surveys the R&D servitization organizations in manufacturing industry by questionnaire and interview methods. First, our findings suggest that the outputs created by service-oriented R&D organizations were not only new technologies developed through existing R&D and applications such as extensions and adaptations of technologies, but also integration and design methods to embed technologies into service systems utilizing site knowledge received from the customers. Second, the R&D collaboration with customers changes behaviors of researchers, so that they create new research themes by enlarging the research scope to create a new service system. As a result, a new type of service-oriented researcher has emerged in industry.