CSTIO Seminar with Stephan Henneberg (Queen Mary University of London)

Towards Achieving Successful Servitization: Organization Architecture Configurations, and Outline of Future Research Streams

Abstract

Despite the growing importance of servitization as a source of competitiveness, flexibility and adaptability for manufacturers, limited knowledge exists about organizational issues of servitization. Drawing on transaction cost economics theory and a configuration theoretical perspective, the research seminar introduces the concept of servitization and highlights different organization architectures for servitization and how firms align such architectures with servitization approaches to achieve high financial performance. Equifinal configurations of servitization characteristics are revealed to achieve high financial performance for each organization architecture. The internal specialized service business unit turns out as a flexible organization architecture to successfully provide smoothing, adapting, and substituting services. A holistic research stream on servitization is outlined, identifying several ongoing research foci.

About Prof Stephan Henneberg

Stephan is Chair Professor of Marketing and Strategy at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. He received his PhD from the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. After having been a strategy consultant with A.T. Kearney and McKinsey & Co, Stephan returned to academia, first at the University of Bath and then at Manchester Business School, before moving to London in 2013. His research interests are in the areas of business relationships and networks, sales interaction management, servitization, and strategy formulation. He has published more than 200 articles in leading international journals such as the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Product Innovation Marketing, Journal of International Marketing, Long Range Planning, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, or Marketing Theory. He is an Honorary Board member of Industrial Marketing Management. Stephan is the Distinguished Visiting Professor at IULM, Milan, Visiting Academic Fellow at the Cambridge Service Alliance, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, Visiting Professor of Marketing, University of Bamberg, and Visiting Scholar, Culverhouse College of Business, University of Alabama.