Smart Product-Service Systems: A Novel Transdisciplinary Sociotechnical Paradigm

Abstract

The third-wave of IT competition have embraced a promising market of low cost, high performance smart, connected products (SCP). Owing to their unique capabilities, SCPs together with their generated smart services, as a solution bundle can fulfil the everchanging individual user’s needs. Meanwhile, manufacturers/service providers leverage massive user generated data and product sensed data via the Internet-of-Things (IoT) for evergreen design innovation. This emerging IT-driven transdisciplinary engineering paradigm is named Smart Product-Service Systems (Smart PSS), which is an ecosystem consisting of various stakeholders as the key players for open innovation (social aspect), intelligent systems as the infrastructure to enable smartness and connectedness (technical aspect), and digital servitization as the value proposition to make higher profits (business aspect). Though similar terminologies have been utilized to describe such paradigm, none of them emphasizes its transdisciplinary essence, as a sociotechnical system. Moreover, scarcely any work addresses its lifecycle perspectives for sustainability concerns. Aiming to fill these gaps, this research provides a fundamental basis of Smart PSS by summarizing typical works from technical, social, and business aspects, respectively. Furthermore, its lifecycle perspectives in a circular economy is depited to motivate more in-depth research in the near future.