Main obstacles to adopting service innovation by all EU manufacturing industries

Even though product-service solutions are not new for the European manufacturing domain, they are becoming more and more an integral part of manufacturing industries’ offer, thus extending the concept of pure product to a combination of aggregated services around a product. In this regard they are able to differentiate the product value proposition, to foster the revenue stream and, to some extent, to replace the traditional product sale by means of more innovative service-oriented business models. Nevertheless, five main obstacles are still preventing service innovation to be pervasively adopted by all EU manufacturing industries, including SMEs. These constraints are related to the following dichotomies: integration between products and services across the value chain, interoperability between design and manufacturing, mediation between professional knowledge and crowd sentiments, balance between Service-Oriented and Event-Driven processes, implementation of productivity-based strategies with service-oriented and Internet-based businesses. Therefore, this paper aims at presenting new methods and tools as well as new way for integrating existing ones for overcoming these obstacles. By doing so, European manufacturers will be able to enhance their competitiveness by reducing time-to-market through more attractive and sustainable product-service solutions.