An action repertoire for the collaboration in servitization

Purpose: One of the key challenges in the servitization of companies is developing the required capabilities to deliver advanced services. A strategy to tackle this challenge is to collaborate with a service-providing partner, that has complimentary capabilities. In such collaboration, though, the people involved have to serve their corporate goals and have different organisational and professional backgrounds. The differences challenge the collaboration. In practice, people struggle to deal with the critical situations that arise when these differences affect the collaboration. The literature’s recommendations on what to do in those situations show great variety and can even be contradictory. This paper presents a repertoire of actions people can take in the critical situations they experience when collaborating with a service-provider. Design/methodology/approach: Based on an earlier study into critical situations in the collaboration in those networks, we developed an experiment to study what people do in those situations. We asked thirty managers with experience in such collaborations what they would do in the fifteen situations we provided. Findings: Across the situations presented in the simulation experiment, recurring themes emerged in the activities people undertook and further analysis resulted in a repertoire of actions that servitizing collaborators can take to act upon the critical situations in servitization they experience while collaborating with service providers. Originality/Value: This paper provides practitioners in servitization collaboration with a hands-on action repertoire. This repertoire can be further developed into a general tool for collaboration in servitization to resolve collaborative issues as they arise.