Servitisation, the transformation from selling products to delivering integrated services, continues to attract growing attention across research and industry. One of the leading platforms for this conversation is the annual Spring Servitisation Conference, organised by the Advanced Services Group at Aston Business School. This year’s edition was held in Bochum, Germany, hosted by ZESS at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and co-organised with the Chair for Industrial Sales and Service Engineering, bringing together researchers and practitioners around a theme that resonates directly with the SET Alliance’s work: servitisation as a multilevel transformation across business models, people, organisations and ecosystems.
Dimitris Karamitsos, senior business developer at BASE and a long-standing servitisation expert, attended the conference and shares his insights in a few points below:
Servitisation as a strategic response, not just a business model choice
A notable shift in this year’s discussions was the framing of servitisation itself. Increasingly, it is being discussed as a strategic response to Europe’s industrial challenge rather than simply a commercial option. Several presentations connected servitisation to firm performance, productivity growth and broader economic impact, positioning the model as directly relevant to Europe’s industrial future.
Part of that argument rests on hardware commoditisation. As products become harder to differentiate on features alone, moving to outcome ownership offers companies a way to escape fierce price competition and build more resilient, recurring revenues. The value proposition shifts away from the machine itself and towards what the machine reliably delivers.
There is no single path, and no shortcut
Among the empirical findings presented, one study drawing on data from 119 manufacturing firms over 15 years stood out. It revealed that companies take genuinely different approaches to servitisation, each with its own strengths and vulnerabilities. The right path depends on an organisation’s context and capabilities rather than any universal playbook.
The research on maturity pointed in a similar direction. Business model maturity correlates with service revenue share, but the transformation happens incrementally; there are no shortcuts through discrete stage jumps. One particularly interesting case showed how applying multiple maturity models to the same industrial company can produce different interpretations of how advanced it actually is, a useful reminder that maturity assessments depend heavily on the lens used.
Scalability depends on coherence
Several sessions addressed a question central to the SET Alliance’s mission: what makes Equipment-as-a-Service and similar models scalable? The conclusion was that scalability depends on the coherence between three architectures: the technology, the organisation, and the business model. When these three are designed in alignment, the model can grow; when they diverge, growth stalls.
The enablers are broader than technology
A consistent thread across the conference was that the barriers to servitisation are rarely technical. Leadership, field service organisation, digital capabilities, sales channels, procurement, ecosystem collaboration and management support all emerged repeatedly as critical success factors. Research from TU Delft added a further dimension: who leads a servitisation initiative, and how they lead it, measurably affects its success.
What this means for the energy transition
For those working on Cooling-as-a-Service, Heating-as-a-Service, Solar-as-a-Service or broader Energy-as-a-Service models, these findings mirror the practical challenges of scaling as-a-service solutions in the energy transition with striking accuracy. Whatever the servitisation model, the challenge is not simply to demonstrate value, but to make these models scalable, bankable, operationally repeatable, and aligned with customer needs and ecosystem realities.
Perhaps the most fundamental takeaway is a definitional one. Servitisation is not about adding services to products, but rather about redesigning the value proposition, the customer relationship, the revenue logic, the internal capabilities and the partner ecosystem around outcomes. That is a far deeper transformation, and it is precisely why the exchange between researchers, practitioners and industry players at events like SSC matters.
The SET Alliance remains committed to strengthening the bridge between servitisation research and practice, in the conviction that the energy transition has much to gain from both.
If you are interested in learning more about servitisation or the insights highlighted here, please reach out to the SET Alliance.
