Mechanisms to conduct Life Cycles of Extended Products

Product life cycle (LC) models are mainly based on the traditional product understanding where the phases from ideation to recycling are sequential steps [1]. Today, products have to be understood as a combination of physical products and related services, so called “extended products” (EP) [2]. A famous example of an extended product is Apples iPhone, a cellular phone as physical core extended by iTunes as access point to software offerings to customize the core with services [3]. LC models addressing the characteristics of the EP concept are rarely discussed in literature [4]. Within this paper, the relationship between product and service LC is discussed to get a better understanding of the extended product LC. It will be shown that there can be both the product as well as the service the incubator for an EP in any phase of their life cycle.