Service infusion in manufacturing and corporate strategies in the service solutions market: driving forces and components

‘Servitization’ as a concept to describe and understand the move of manufacturers from offering capital goods and products to complex solutions containing many services has been around for a while in the literature (see Kowalkowski et al., 2017 for an overview). It describes how manufacturers of capital goods are increasingly reorienting their value propositions and business model from selling products alone to providing solutions that combine products with services to form customer-specific, high-value solutions. Making this move from products to solutions depends on the development of capabilities that facilitate the integration of products and services, as well as the development, selling and delivering of services (Paiola et al., 2013).