Comparison of Design Research on Manufacturing Firms Moving Towards Services

Corresponding to a steadily advancing integration of roducts and service operations in the manufacturing industry, a number of research groups within the design community are working with issues of integrated product and service development. Although closely related, the evolving groups focus on different research dimensions, and thus the terminologies and concepts used in research contributions are not fully compatible.

This research attempts to promote and support an evolving collaboration between the different research groups within the design community, by analysing and comparing the key contribution areas of three of the existing groups, namely the groups of Integrated Product and Service Engineering, Service/Product Engineering and Product/Service-System development.

A review of the groups’ research contributions is carried out and the main characteristics’ of their research is compared. Furthermore a comparative table of concepts and terms used in the contributions of the three groups in compiled. Based on this comparison, 3 focal research dimensions are identified: the product lifecycle dimension, the customer lifecycle dimension and the provider lifecycle dimension.

Finally the research domains’ linkages to other related research domains outside the design community are identified.