Study on the potential of servitisation and other forms of product-service provision for EU SMEs
Publication date: 1 May 2018 | Report language: EN
The objective of this study was to provide an evidence base to the European Commission allowing to support SMEs in seizing the opportunities of servitisation and moving towards other forms of product-service provision, notably, by adopting digital service-based business models. The study also aimed at developing tools for the European Commission to monitor developments in this field, by building on an in-depth analysis of the existing and potential market for servitisation and other forms of product-service provision. A combination of methods were used to triangulate the results such as a literature review, text mining of the Capital IQ database, webscraping of company websites, Input-Output analysis, an SME survey and case studies. As the study found, the interaction between services and manufacturing industries increased between 2000 and 2014 for all EU28 countries. However, the extent to which small and medium-sized firms are servitised is diverse across these countries. The analysis provided further insights about the servitisation level across five selected archetypes, three cross-cutting services and across manufacturing industries. The study analyses in detail the drivers and barriers to servitisation and concludes with policy recommendations in five important areas
