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This paper connects research from business model innovation and information systems by exploring critical IT capabilities for servitized business models. The adoption of servitized business models is a major business model innovation strategy. At the same time, digitalization drives the evolution of IT capabilities at these business models. Scholars argue that it remains unclear how IT capabilities enable servitized business models to build a competitive advantage by achieving cost advantages or differentiation. This paper explores IT capabilities that enable building a competitive advantage for servitized business models based on a qualitative analysis of multiple published case studies. The authors identify configurations of IT capabilities among servitized business models. The findings contribute to servitization research by exploring IT capabilities
and how they are combined among servitized business models.
The insights help practitioners deploy digital technologies and IT
assets effectively as building blocks of IT capabilities to advance
their servitized business model.
For manufacturing firms, success in innovating IT-enabled services is a critical antecedent to benefit from digital servitization of their business models. Digital servitization literature has explored mechanisms for success in innovating IT-enabled services, indicating that the phenomenon is multifaceted and needs to be explained from multiple theoretical perspectives. We derive a conceptual model for success in innovating IT-enabled services covering its multifaceted nature by referring to knowledge-based and organizational control theory. We test this model using qualitative cases of IT-enabled service innovation initiatives in manufacturing firms and use set-theoretic analyses to account for the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon. The necessary condition analysis yields that a certain degree of service innovation capabilities is a prerequisite for success. With the results of a qualitative comparative analysis, we obtain five solution terms as causal recipes for success in innovating IT-enabled services. Our results contribute to research by offering a theory-based approach that explains the multiplicity of success in IT-enabled service innovation. Practitioners benefit from our results by understanding prerequisites and causal recipes for success while learning from unsuccessful initiatives in innovating IT-enabled services of manufacturing firms. Our study is also an example of how to rigorously calibrate qualitative data using a structured approach.
Over the last years, configurational research has become increasingly popular in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Researchers value configurational methods like Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as their application contributes to a better understanding of complex phenomena. QCA helps to uncover interrelations of conditions that lead to an outcome, building on the principles of equifinality, conjunctural causation, and asymmetry. More recently, IS researchers have started to analyze qualitative data, like case study data, with QCA. However, there is a lack of methodological guidance on how to calibrate qualitative data into set membership values for QCA. Therefore, this paper structures methodological steps and the associated options to calibrate qualitative data from an interdisciplinary perspective and critically reviews the observed methodological choices in IS research. This paper also gives recommendations for calibrating qualitative data to support informed methodological choices for future research.
Case study research is one of the most widely used research methods in Information Systems (IS). In recent years, an increasing number of publications have used case studies with few sources of evidence, such as single interviews per case. While there is much methodological guidance on rigorously conducting multiple case studies, it remains unclear how researchers can achieve an acceptable level of rigour for this emerging type of multiple case study with few sources of evidence, i.e., multiple mini case studies. In this context, we synthesise methodological guidance for multiple case study research from a cross-disciplinary perspective to develop an analytical framework. Furthermore, we calibrate this analytical framework to multiple mini case studies by reviewing previous IS publications that use multiple mini case studies to provide guidelines to conduct multiple mini case studies rigorously. We also offer a conceptual definition of multiple mini case studies, distinguish them from other research approaches, and position multiple mini case studies as a pragmatic and rigorous approach to research emerging and innovative phenomena in IS.
The transition towards services has been imperative for manufacturing firms for years. The change from a productoriented to a more service-dominant business model affects the organizational structure of firms. However, literature provides limited insights into how manufacturing firms organize themselves in this transition. Even though digital technologies are critical for the transition, it is unclear how to orchestrate digital and traditional Information Technology (IT) resources in manufacturing firms accordingly. We analyze the case of a typical manufacturing firm that has adjusted its structure to reorganize for solution offerings based on product, service, and digital components. Our results describe a hybrid organizational structure that splits front- and back-end units. The back-end units are split along solution components. Digital IT resources are internalized and governed decentrally, with traditional IT resources being outsourced and steered centrally. Our findings contribute to digital servitization research by clarifying the overarching as well as the digital and traditional IT-related organization for manufacturing firms.
In the era of digitalization, companies review how to build competitive advantage drawing on their capabilities. In this context, the paper revisits the concept of IT capabilities. We summarize the “canonical” body of literature to characterize how leading scholars conceptualized and differentiated IT capabilities and then we show how new types of IT capabilities (for example, rising from SMACIT technologies) relate to this. We find that the resource-based view is still leading in how to conceptualize IT capabilities. However, an alternative perspective on IT assets is emerging, looking at it from the angle of digital technologies as stacks. Digital technologies form the foundation for a new technology-driven perspective on IT capabilities. This new view complements the established differentiation of IT capabilities considering IT infrastructure flexibility, IT management, and IT personnel capability. Both perspectives describe the explorative and exploitative nature of IT capabilities. This paper helps scholars and practitioners to clearly distinguish different perspectives of IT capabilities on how to build a competitive advantage from IT today.