Data lifecycle and technology-based opportunities in new Product Service System offering towards a multidimensional framework

With the advent of the 4th industrial revolution and unprecedented possibility to connect products to the internet, the capability of a firm to collect data and enhance service offering has expanded significantly. An enormous amount of data is generated from connected products and gathered from sensors; data is sent to the cloud via wireless networks and stored, and the possibility to distribute new cloud-based services leveraging data analysis is becoming concrete. Nevertheless, develop such services and create valuable insight both to the final customer and to other users, is not a simple task. Different choices have to be made by the company, which lead to different value and challenges. With this respect, the paper develops a theoretical framework considering the possibilities a firm can evaluate in the view of data lifecycle. In particular, authors stipulate that the value a firm can offer to the customer changes with respect to the source of data that he/she decided to gather, the storing technology he/she wants to use, and the way he/she wants to deploy the services. The framework can be used as a support to product-based firms which wants to start the servitization path exploiting data availability. The research, at the same time, provides evidence on the evolution of service offerings, which are shifting from a product-centric perspective to a data-centred one and are going to enlarge their scope.