New service development in capital goods manufacturers: empirical evidence from an Italian sample and proposal of a conceptual framework

Since Italian capital goods manufacturers are still strongly product-oriented while current trends are pushing traditionally manufacturers towards the servitization of their business, practitioners in this sector call for support in approaching the service innovation in a more clearly defined way; this could prevent them to miss a new service innovation opportunity or to fail in developing new services. In this respect, the aim of the research presented in this paper is to evaluate the state-of-the-art of the development of the New Service Development (NSD) process in the capital goods sector, both through a literature review and trough the analysis of qualitative case studies of a sample of 23 Italian companies. From the analysis it has emerged that there is the lack of defined models for NSD both in literature and in practice. Reasons could be related to the difficulties in modeling such a process within this manufacturing context since usually industrial service providers customize service offering according to individual customer needs so that new services are developed on a single base and not in a systematic way. For these reasons, starting from the analysis of the state-of-the-art, a conceptual framework and related guidelines have been developed to support practitioners in improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the innovation process taking into consideration the peculiarities of the reference sector. The research is still at its first steps, so further work is called for to support those companies in approaching the service innovation.