A Thirty-Year Bibliometric Analysis on Servitization

Introduction

In recent years, due to the intensified competition, many industrial manufacturers decided to adopt a new strategic behaviour through which the competition is not cost-basis anymore but it is build on the capability to create an offering able to better meet customers’ needs (Porter & Ketels, 2003; Salonen, 2011) by adding services to their offering (Ishola & Olusoji, 2020). This new strategy has been conceptualized as “servitization”.

The term appeared for the first time in the European Management Journal, in the paper titled “Servitization of business: adding value by adding services” written by Vandermerwe & Rada in 1988. In general, the concept has been used to explain the phenomenon of combination between intangible services and tangible products as a manufacturing firm’s business strategy (Gaiardelli et al., 2015; Lee et al., 2016; Sminia et al., 2019) able to provide a competitive advantage (Vandermerwe & Rada, 1988; Baines et al., 2009; Leoni, 2015). For manufacturers this involves overcoming numerous challenges (Alghisi & Saccani, 2015; Kanninen et al., 2017; Vaittinen et al., 2018) to enhance the value of their tangible products through the provision of services able to offer a more stable long-term income and higher profit margins than products alone (Wise & Baumgartner, 1999; Kohtamaki et al., 2015; Davies et al., 2006; Rymaszewska et al., 2017). Thus, servitization has demonstrated to be a promising strategy for the success of manufacturing companies (Cusumano et al., 2015; Fang et al., 2008).

During the last three decades, servitization has gained the attention of both scholars and practitioners around the world, and journals have dedicated numerous special issues to the topic (e.g. Stahlbock et al., 2018). A vast amount of academic work has been produced and, due to the large volume and fragmented nature of this research (Nudurupati et al., 2016; Kowalkowski et al., 2017; Bigdeli et al., 2018), it is difficult to gain a holistic view on what is actually known about servitization. Moreover, servitization has been almost always defined through the investigation of the so-called “servitization-related communities” (e.g. Lightfoot et al., 2013; Rabetino et al., 2018), thus treating and considering different terms – such as servitization, product-service system, service infusion, solution – simultaneously and sometimes even interchangeably (Paiola et al., 2013; Gaiardelli et al., 2014a; Leoni & Poggesi, 2017). This resulted in terminological confusion and misunderstanding both between academics and practitioners (Green et al., 2017; Kowalkowski et al., 2017) as well as in knowledge acquisition problems related to the topic (Baines & Shi, 2015).

Stemming from the above, this study develops a bibliometric analysis exclusively centred on servitization, providing a structured investigation of the discipline and clarifying its social, intellectual, and conceptual structures. To fulfil this objective, the bibliometrix softaware has been used (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017) for the analysis of co-citation, collaboration, and co-occurrence applied to all the documents containing the word “servitization” and published from 1988 to 2017 in Scopus and Web of Science (henceforth, WoS) databases.