PSS Business Case Map: Supporting Idea Generation in PSS Design Available to Purchase

This paper proposes the PSS Business Case Map as a tool to support designers’ idea generation in PSS design. The map visualizes the similarities among PSS business cases in a two-dimensional diagram. To make the map, PSS business cases are first collected by conducting, for example, a literature survey. The collected business cases are then classified from multiple aspects that characterize each case such as its product type, service type, target customer, and so on. Based on the results of this classification, the similarities among the cases are calculated and visualized by using the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) technique. A SOM is a type of artificial neural network that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) view from high-dimensional data. The visualization result is offered to designers in a form of a two-dimensional map, which is called the PSS Business Case Map. By using the map, designers can figure out the position of their current business and can acquire ideas for the servitization of their business.