Exploring how Digitized Products enable Industrial Service Innovation - An Affordance Perspective

This paper explores the impact of digitized products on industrial service innovation. Digital technolo-gies equip physical products with versatile material properties that create a multitude of opportunities for value co-creation. In particular, product-complementing service offerings are an obvious field for investigating service innovation that leverage digitized products. We contribute to research on digitally enabled service systems that progressively emerge in industrial settings. Anchored in a revelatory case study in the intra-logistics industry, we explore how digitized products are put to innovative uses. Spe-cifically, we take an affordance perspective to identify goal-oriented action potentials that arise from material properties of the digitized product and organizational use contexts in service systems. Inter-preting case data, we show how original equipment manufacturers create the potential to (1) monitor and control industrial products remotely; (2) empower technical customer service; (3) manage, opti-mize, and integrate product operations; and (4) offer performance-based contracting of industrial prod-ucts. Besides identifying affordances and demonstrating how digitized products enable novel configu-rations in service systems, we contribute to theory by (1) proposing a framework to conceptualize af-fordances of digitized products for service innovation and (2) linking the service-dominant logic with affordance theory.