Collaborative Business Services Provision

The association of services to manufactured products, leading to service-enhanced products, is an important mechanism for value creation and differentiation. This is particularly relevant in the case of complex, highly customized and long-life products. Suitable servicing in this context typically requires the collaboration among multiple stakeholders. Furthermore, the involvement of the customer is not limited to service consumption but rather includes contributions to new services design and configuration. As such, this paper contributes to the clarification of concepts and definition of a framework for collaborative business services design (co-creation) and delivery. Application examples are illustrated for the solar energy sector.