Development and Validation of a Maturity Model for Digital Servitization of Manufacturing Companies

Servitization is considered a path to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. The trend of servitization is particularly relevant for manufacturers, as many companies are moving from selling products to selling product service systems (PSS). Manufacturers are increasingly leveraging digital technologies to support their integrated offerings, a trend called “digital servitization”. More in general, to achieve servitization companies are required to undergo great changes. Maturity Models are crucial tools to guide companies in pursuing the transition. Literature proposes many maturity models related to servitization, only few of them are designed to address digital servitization. Moreover, these mostly focus on digital characteristics of the integrated offerings or on the companies’ digital architecture, not considering a more encompassing perspective of the companies. This work aims at developing and implementing a descriptive maturity model, which focuses on digital servitization practices, for manufacturing companies. The maturity model is developed following the design science research methodology and has been applied in four manufacturing companies operating in the B2B context. The model appears to be able to effectively assess the maturity of manufacturing companies considering their current digital servitization practices’ level. This work contributes to the existing literature on digital servitization, by proposing a dedicated maturity model and identifying opportunities for improvements to be addressed by future researches.