A Product-Service System Design Framework Based on a Business Ecosystem

Nowadays, enterprises’ efforts are focused on increasing their product values with additional services and contents to satisfy diverse customer needs in competitive market environments. Trends of integrating services and products lead to the emergence of a product-service system (PSS). To enable designers and manufactures to implement and embody a PSS solution in new product development, there is a need for a comprehensive design framework to facilitate the design factors of PSS in complex business environments. The objective of this research is to propose a product-service system design framework to identify design factors for products and services in the context of a business ecosystem. In this paper, we introduce primary and secondary functions to understand customer purchasing motivations, which can be represented as the design factors. A survey on representative IT products is conducted to identify the design factors in terms of PSS. A business ecosystem is a group of entities associated with PSS. With the emergence of PSS, competitions in homogeneous market segment now become confrontations among different business ecosystems. In the proposed framework, we define a Product-Service platform (PS platform) as interface for customers toward PSS manufacturers, its supplier, and contents providers in the business ecosystem. Further, we discuss PS platform’s roles and advantages with case studies involving electronic consumer products.