Business model innovation in complex servitized systems: the case of OBC in capital equipment SMEs

Cranes, off-road and on-road automotive industries have lately engaged in offering use-based services, in which the object of supplier customer relation is not based on a product, but on a service. Machine as a service (MAAS) and Output-based Contracting (OBC) solutions have appeared also in capital equipment production industries, that are far less glamorous than automotive world-class manufacturers, but are as well important in our local systems of production and innovation. These strategic movements are strictly related to the recent technological scenario. Nowadays, digitalization (and in particular technologies like IOT, Cloud platforms, Big Data analysis) is pushing innovative firms to use services in order to create entirely new business models, finally migrating from the product-centric approaches to (digital) service-oriented ones (Rymaszewska et al., 2017). Unfortunately, B2B firms recognize that the possibility of accessing richer sources of data specific to their customer is greater than ever, but they lack a clear and defined strategy that encompasses the use of those data (Lilien, 2016). The object of this research project is to study how digitalization has affected firms' business models, with a special attention to medium-sized capital equipment companies involved in Output Based Contracting. Little research work has been done to date on this topic, that has a disrupting impact on the aforementioned companies.