Intra-firm and inter-firm challenges in servitization ecosystem: Experiences from five product-centric firms in different industries: Servitization ecosystem

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the challenges in the servitization journey of product centric firms from an ecosystem perspective, considering both intra-firm and inter-firm levels. Prior research addresses the challenges of servitization in many sectors from different perspectives. However, the majority of studies primarily focus on the provider of offering. There is a lack of in-depth studies on analysing servitization challenges from the broader set of network actors including customers, suppliers, and sub-suppliers at the intra-firm and interfirm levels. A multiple case study method was used to analyse five product-centric firms from different industries that were engaged in servitization. At intra-firm level, our analysis shows that ‘uncertainty’ and ‘risk’ is a major challenge for provider, customer, and supplier, and that ‘coordination and structure’ is a major challenge for provider, supplier, and sub-supplier. At inter-firm level, ‘partnership management’ found to be a most significant challenge for
provider, customer, supplier, and sub-supplier. The study contributes to the discussion of relational view approach for servitization research.