Luna LeoniThesis Defence

Ph.D. in Management Curriculum in Business Administration

January 28, 2015

In the last fifty years, the economy has been characterized by a transition that led to advanced industrial nations to be increasingly less based on physical output, and more on intellectual and intangible assets.

In particular, the environment in which modern firms compete is characterized by an increase in the:•Use and dissemination of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT);•Integration and interaction among different countries, i.e., globalization; and •Importance of the production environmental impacts.

Due to these new market conditions, manufacturing firms – more than others – need to redefine their business model (Klaila, 2000) through the implementation and deployment of new processes, namely: Servitization and Knowledge Management.

Therefore, it is important to understand – both in theory and practice – how a manufacturing firm can create and maintain a competitive advantage against its competitors through the application of these two processes.

“How can the implementation

of a knowledge management

system facilitate the adoption

of the servitization strategy?”

The following two research methods have been applied:

1.Systematic Literature Review: it allows to identify, review, and synthesize – in a transparent and rigorous way – all the literature currently available (Victor, 2008) on the topics analysed. It differs from traditional narrative reviews (Huff, 2009; Cooper, 1998) by being more explicit in the selection of the studies and by employing rigorous and reproducible methods of evaluation.

2.Inductive Single-Case Study: Inductive studies are especially useful for developing theoretical insights when research focuses on areas that extant theory does not address well (Ozcan; Eisenhardt, 2009); Single-case studies can richly describe the existence of a phenomenon (Siggelkow, 2007); and the choice of the IBM Corporation is appropriate because it represents a recognized successful servitization model.

1. THE PROCESS

2. DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE (I)

Time-line distribution of the papers

2. DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE (II)

Geographical distribution of the papers

2. DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE (III)

Journal distribution of the papers

3. THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE

The literature that jointly considers servitization and knowledge in general focuses on the designers’ role. Thus, the successful implementation of a servitization strategy seems to be entirely based on designers’ role, capabilities and skills.

Moreover, much still needs to be done in terms of quantitative research.

In conclusion, even though the two topics analysed by this systematic literature review are particularly relevant in modern society, they are still not well addressed by the academic world. This allows the identification of a research gap and the possibility for future work to try to fill this gap, through theoretical and practical research.

4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Data sources followed Yin (1994, 1989) and occurred through:

•Interviews, with internal professionals belonging to different IBM business units; and

•Corporate documents: Internet web pages, annual reports, publications and internal documents.

1. DATA COLLECTION (I)

1. DATA COLLECTION (II)

• Courtroom questioning: to carry out interviews that emphasized facts, avoiding questions that typically yield vague answers;

• Event tracking: the informants were put back in the time frame of the events, and then guided forward to produce a chronology of events that was as accurate as possible (Eisenhardt, 1989);

• Non-directive questioning: to allow the possibility of answering freely.

1. DATA COLLECTION (III)

• Cross-interview analysis: the insights that emerged from each interview were compared with those from other interviews in order to identify similar constructs and themes (Ozcan; Eisenhardt, 2009; Eisenhardt; Graebner, 2007).

• Each interviews notes taken were then compared in order to highlight similarities and differences.

• The results emerging from the interviews analysis were triangulated with data from corporate documents.

2. DATA ANALYSIS

3. FINDINGS (I)

3. FINDINGS (II)

3. FINDINGS (III)

4. THE MODEL

The main outcome of this thesis is an increased understanding of the servitization strategy applied by manufacturing firms.

The core contributions of this study can be summarized as follows:

•A literature gap between servitization and knowledge has been identified;

•An in-depth case study has been applied in order to demonstrate that the literature gap should be filled; and

•The five connections points identified through the case study led to the development of a model, which represents a novel way of examining servitization in a knowledge management perspective.

• Academics: because both the results of the systematic literature

review and the findings of the inductive case study enhance cross-

disciplinary research, instigating discussion among scholars from

different disciplines, which can contribute to exploit or explore

interesting research areas; and

• Managers/industry practitioners: because the model identified –

through the analysis of the IBM Corporation – can help

manufacturing firms for better understanding how their knowledge

management system could be used or modified in order to facilitate

their transformation process into product-service providers.

Further research should take the case study proposed in this thesis as a pilot case to

conduct other studies with larger sample. This will allow testing the validity of the model

and its generalizability.

The Author has identified a major opportunity: to investigate the situation of the Italian

manufacturing firms. In particular, will be interesting to be able to respond to the

following research questions:

1.“Is the servitization recognized as a useful strategy by the Italian manufacturing firms?”

2.“Is the knowledge management system used to facilitate the servitization strategy

adoption in the Italian manufacturing firms?”

The analysis carried out in this thesis aims to verify if and how the knowledge management systems can support both the adoption and the implementation of the servitization strategy in manufacturing firms.

The case study results seem to prove that different types of connections between the two analysed topics (i.e., servitization and knowledge management) exist.

Moreover, even though the servitization could not be anymore considered as a nascent field, there are a lot of different perspectives of this phenomenon – such as the knowledge management perspective – that are only partially mentioned in the literature, but that represent interesting areas of development.

Therefore, the topic still represents a flourishing field for Scholars, coming also from

different disciplines. Thus, further research is advisable, required, and necessary.

Luna LeoniThesis Defence

Ph.D. in Management Curriculum in Business Administration

January 28, 2015