The recent macro‐economic events have contributed to an increased awareness of the strategic relevance deriving from the provision of services related to products as an economic remedy for facing the sharp downfall of the markets. The result is a sudden and steep accumulation of empirical knowledge coming out from the various and dispersed “lessons learned” which managers and engineers are currently experiencing in supporting the transition of their companies to a Product‐Service orientation. Early researchers in the ‘60s made a fundamental distinction in considering a product as a thing and a service as an act. Nowadays, this distinction, which links goods to something tangible and services to something intangible, is vanishing because many service outputs rely also on substantial material components and, conversely, many manufactured products have embedded intangible service attributes. Since the ‘80s a marketing‐oriented approach has dominated the service and product‐service research as well as the definition of companies’ strategy. The same cannot be said from the Engineering and the Operations Management standpoint. Their attention has been mainly devoted to the provision of an artefact through effective and efficient supply chains, neglecting the importance of designing and engineering ‐ since its early life cycle stages ‐ the connected services and of laying down a consistent service provision chain. The basic idea behind the Product-Service System (PSS) concept ensues from an innovation strategy, shifting the business focus from the design and sales of physical products to the design and sales of a system consisting of products, services, supporting networks and infrastructures, which are jointly capable of valuing a customer request and fulfilling the requirements of the other stakeholders involved along its life cycle [1] [2] [3] [4]. In this context, Service Engineering is becoming a predominant field. Sharing the definitions provided by Bullinger et al.(2003) [5] and Sakao et al. (2009) [6] it can be termed as a technical discipline concerned with the systematic development and design of services aiming at increasing the value of artefacts. It calls for a design and development of an integrated offering valuable to customers in order to contribute to a continuous positive change of state throughout the journey of experience they stage with a PSS. This cultural shift from a transaction-based approach to a long-term relational journey with the customer still needs to be thoroughly understood by companies along with the acquisition of the suitable models, methods and tools for collecting, engineering and embedding in a PSS all the knowledge that meets or exceeds people’s emotional needs and expectations [7]. The general notion of a PSS entails multiple elements to be designed, developed, implemented and supported, including: products, processes, software and technology, people, shared information and organisations. As a result, an interdisciplinary approach is required with the integration of different perspectives embracing a plurality of disciplines, in most of the cases distant from the traditional engineering perspective.
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