Servitization 2019

Servitization 2019

Servitization 2019: 8th International Conference on Business Servitization (ICBS 2019)

November 21-22, 2019

Final program: Click here to download the Final program

University of Deusto, San Sebastian, Basque Country, Spain

Book of Abstracts – Printed Edition: Amazon - Lulu

Digital Edition (Open Access): pdf






Keynote Speakers: Prof. Vinit Parida (LuleĆ„ University of Technology), Prof. Yipeng Liu (Henley Business School)
Conference Chairs: Lorea Narvaiza, Marco Opazo and Tontxu Campos
Director scientific committee: PhD Ferran Vendrell-Herrero (University of Birmingham)

Focal theme: New and Emergent approaches in servitization research


The last three decades have seen a steady growth of interest in servitization – not only within manufacturers and service providers but also across the Management and Organizational literature. The study of servitization has evolved to become increasingly interdisciplinary, ranging from managerial aspects of strategy formulation and implementation to studies of the links between breakthrough technologies, business model innovation, and advanced service offerings. Thus, over the last decade, servitization has opened frontiers and expanded its scope to new fields, such as territorial competitiveness, engineering, ICT, Human resources, education, mobility, healthcare, innovation, sustainability, among others. Nowadays, servitization literature is well-established among the academic research and practitioner community, adding new followers on an ongoing basis which expands the knowledge base and debate surrounding this field, provide new guidelines, and make servitization an increasingly competitive and attractive research topic.

Although servitization expands at a rapid pace, at this point, we consider a matter of the utmost importance to analyze what the future of servitization will be. In this way, we attempt to envisage the future lines of research, as well as, the main fields that will play a transcendental role in the future of servitization. To this aim, the present conference focuses on the following main premises:

  • How can interdisciplinary collaboration toward a common agenda be promoted and supported?
  • What are the future challenges of the servitization research field when considering the stock of accumulated academic knowledge and real-world trends? What will the research field look like in ten years?
  • How can the servitization community develop the domain further? Which are the alternative paths of advancing the field? What does each path involve and what the real implications for the field’s development are in each case?
  • Does the domain have to develop following a single path? Alternatively, can the future development take many paths simultaneously?

This edition of the International Conference on Business Servitization (ICBS) aims at debating and shaping such critical questions for the future development of the field. Accordingly, the focus of this year is on multidisciplinary topics that may strengthen and consolidate emergent research perspectives, as well as, open new research directions in servitization literature. With more than 30 years as a field of research, servitization has grasped the attention of multiple management-related disciplines, becoming one of the most promising and integrative research themes emerged in the last few decades. This year's conference aims to discuss what are the future challenges of the servitization research field, and how can the servitization community develop the domain further. To do so, we encourage academics in providing new and emergent theoretical lenses that can contribute to developing servitization-related research in the future.

This edition of the ICBS is a conference traditionally targeted to business professionals, policymakers and researchers. While the focus of this year’s conference will be “New and Emergent approaches in servitization research”, as in previous editions the organizers also endeavor to connect works related to other relevant issues linked with servitization such as business engineering, strategy, business models, international business, operations management, and supply chain management. The conference will engage current research on the emerging field of servitization, which focuses both on theoretical developments and on practical applications of the methods and techniques. The conference aims to provide a platform to the researchers and practitioners from both academia as well as industry to meet & share the cutting-edge developments in the field of servitization.

Topics 

Special sessions on specific topics are also encouraged. Topics of interest mainly include, but not limited to:
  • Business models and strategy 
    • Partnerships, strategic alliances, outsourcing, joint-ventures, M&As and servitization 
    • Advanced business services and collaborative practices in business model innovation 
    • The internationalization of product-service offering
    • Financial, legal and risk aspects of services
    • Talent management, human resources, and recruitment needs
    • Resilience, agility, ambidexterity and other firm capabilities 
  • Territorial Servitization 
    • Economic assessment of the impact of collaborative product-service innovation on firm and territorial competitiveness 
    • What are the antecedents, moderators/mediators, and outcomes of knowledge-intensive service-manufacturing collaborations on organizational resilience and performance? 
    • Conceptualization and provision of evidence on collaborative approaches to cluster and industrial district policies formed by multi-sector, including manufacturing and service, firms. 
    • Do KIBS firms offer opportunities for local manufacturing SMEs to outsource service provision? And for multinationals to reshoring their production to the home country? Which is the relevance of geographical distance when it comes to transferring knowledge from service to product firms?
  • Supply chain management and marketing 
    • Servitization and collaborative supply chain management 
    • Internet of things and linking channels 
    • Product-service innovation processes and organizational performance indicators 
    • Servitization and Customer Relationship Management and customer value perception
    • Sustainability, circular models, and green initiatives boost by servitization
    • Business engineering 
      • Industry 4.0 - Hybridization of the physical and digital worlds
      • Internet of things, Cloud Computing, and Sensors enabled services
      • Service system and Service network design 
      • Tools and toolkits for engineering servitization processes
      • Big data and machine learning for services development


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