Playful conceptual design of industrial product service systems: An experiment

It is known well that the development of industrial product-service systems (IPS2) is a challenging task for solution providers. In order to enable the full potential of these new systems the companies have to establish a new mindset among their developers. This is necessary to overcome the barrier of thinking in separate product and service domains. This leads to the fact that new ways of teaching the aforementioned cross domain thinking need to be broadened. This paper describes an experiment which aims at the evaluation of such an approach. Based on principles of business games it supports the development of initial concepts of an IPS2. In the experiment 122 students were asked to create a concept of an IPS2 solution by using either this gamestorming or a traditional brainstorming method. The research hypothesis states that the game-based approach supports a better exploration of the underlying solution space and so the adoption of the new IPS2 mindset is more effective. Results have shown that this hypothesis has been approved to be right. Further work will ask more precisely after certain details of this process in industrial environments.