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Exploring the Journey to Services

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Handbook of Service Science, Volume II

Abstract

Firms are increasingly providing services to complement their product offerings. The vast majority of studies on the service journey, also known as servitization or service transition, examine the challenges and enablers of the process of change through cases studies. Investigations that provide an in-depth longitudinal analysis of the steps involved in the service journey are much rarer. Such a detailed understanding is required in order to appreciate fully how firms can leverage the enablers while overcoming the challenges of servitization. This study investigates what does a service journey look like? It analyzes in some detail the actual service journeys undertaken by three firms in the well-being, engineering and learning sectors. The paper offers four original contributions. First, in the change literature, there are two dominant theories: The punctuated equilibrium model and the continuous change model. This study demonstrates that servitization follows a continuous change rather than a punctuated equilibrium. It shows that such continuous change is neither logical nor structured but much more emergent and intuitive in nature. Second, the study provides empirical evidence to support a contingency view of the dominance and sequencing of the different process models of change across the change journey. Third, this research shows the pace of service development and when the coexistence of basic, intermediate and complex services occurs. Finally, it contributes to the literature in the service field by presenting three actual service journeys and the associated seven stages of the service strategy model that organizations should consider when managing their service journeys. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that shows when in the journey firms start launching a combination of different types of services.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cambridge Service Alliance, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Veronica Martinez, Andy Neely & Chander Velu

  2. BAE Systems plc, London, UK

    Stewart Leinster-Evans

  3. International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, USA

    Dav Bisessar

Authors
  1. Veronica Martinez
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  2. Andy Neely
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  3. Chander Velu
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  4. Stewart Leinster-Evans
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  5. Dav Bisessar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Veronica Martinez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA

    Paul P. Maglio

  2. IBM Research—Almaden, San Jose, CA, USA

    Cheryl A. Kieliszewski

  3. IBM Cognitive Opentech, Almaden, San Jose, CA, USA

    James C. Spohrer

  4. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Kelly Lyons

  5. INESCTEC and Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Lia Patrício

  6. Graduate School of Management, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Business School, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

    Yuriko Sawatani

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Martinez, V., Neely, A., Velu, C., Leinster-Evans, S., Bisessar, D. (2019). Exploring the Journey to Services. In: Maglio, P.P., Kieliszewski, C.A., Spohrer, J.C., Lyons, K., Patrício, L., Sawatani, Y. (eds) Handbook of Service Science, Volume II. Service Science: Research and Innovations in the Service Economy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98512-1_17

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