Digital technologies in product-service systems: a literature review and a research agenda

Digital technologies are encouraging manufacturing companies in their servitization process by accelerating the offer of integrated product and service to create new value and grow relationships with customers in the Industry 4.0 era. In parallel, digitalization and servitization research streams are merging and paving the way for the Smart Product-Service System (Smart PSS). By analyzing the concept of Smart PSS, this paper questions the convergence between digital and service orientations and considers how digital technologies are used to enable decisions along the PSS lifecycle and/or at different planning levels. Applying topic modeling, a semi-systematic literature review on the combination of digital technologies with PSS has highlighted five main research streams: PSS design, digital servitization, assessing tool for PSS decisions, knowledge management along the lifecycle, sustainability business models. The development over time of these research streams has been tracked leading to the definition of a new research agenda on Smart PSS.