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This study aims to explore a paradigm for using servitization in circular supply chains, with research fields including smart, sustainable supply chains, circular economy, innovation, digital technology, product service systems and sustainability as focal areas.

A comprehensive statistical analysis of the literature on servitization, circular economy and smart supply chains reveals the history of the industry, including scholarly work, major concerns and future research prospects. The database for the analysis is provided by Scopus. Consequently, 288 research articles were reviewed, and the research trends of servitization, circular supply chains and smart supply chains from 2014 to 2022 (Q1) were covered.

The analysis reconnoitres bibliometric statistics highlighting notable authors, contemporary keywords for sifting through the literature, scientific dimensions related to smart supply chain, servitization and the circular economy, historical growth based on exploration trends and country-by-country investigation of the research field. The study also proposes a conceptual framework that illustrates how a greater emphasis on removing barriers to servitization could increase the efficiency of various circular supply chains. Given this, there is room for further research into the role servitization plays in ensuring long-term sustainability.

This paper helps to understand current scholarly publications on servitization, smart supply chains and their significance in the circular economy. It also provides a template to utilize the field’s prior accomplishments as a guide to future research opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the pricing decisions and earning potential of the software supplier and the smart device manufacturer in different software promotion strategies.

Based on game theory, the authors formulate two promotion models, that is, the supplier implements software promotion activities individually (SP model) or outsources the promotion activity to the manufacturer under profit-sharing contract (MP model) when taking different channel power structures into consideration. Besides, in order to test the robustness of the conclusions, the authors also extend the basic model to the following situations: (1) the customers have different price elasticity toward service fee and product price; (2) the revenue sharing contract is employed by the supply chain members; and (3) the manufacturer's product promotion practice is taken into consideration.

The optimal service fee (product price) of the supplier (manufacturer) under SP model is always lower (higher) than that under MP model. Surprisingly, if the supplier is the channel leader and the profit sharing ratio exceeds certain threshold, the manufacturer's profit decreases in profit sharing ratio, which remains robust in three extension models. Moreover, the supply chain's profit in supplier-led game is always lower than that in Nash game irrespective of the promotion strategy in profit sharing context. When revenue sharing contract is adopted, the result holds only when the revenue sharing ratio is relatively low.

The authors originally explore two promotion strategies of the software supplier when taking the channel power structures into considerations, which has not been explored in the literature to the best of the authors' knowledge.

The paper attempts to address the following research questions (RQs): RQ1: What are the main research topics within PSS research? RQ2: What are future trends for PSS research?

Twenty years of research (1999–2018) on product-service systems (PSS) produced a significant amount of scientific literature on the topic. As the PSS field is relatively new and fragmented across different disciplines, a review of the prior and relevant literature is important in order to provide the necessary framework for understanding current developments and future perspectives. This paper aims to review and organize research contributions regarding PSS. A machine-learning algorithm, namely Latent Dirichlet Allocation, has been applied to the whole literature corpus on PSS in order to understand its structure.

The adopted approach resulted in the definition of eight distinct and representative topics able to deal adequately with the multidisciplinarity of the PSS. Furthermore, a systematic review of the literature is proposed to summarize the state-of-the-art and limitations in the identified PSS research topics. Based on this critical analysis, major gaps and future research challenges are presented and discussed.

On the basis of the results of the topic landscape, the paper presents some potential research opportunities on PSSs. In particular, challenges, transversal to the eight research topics and related to recent technology trends and digital transformation, have been discussed.

This study is a reference for manufacturers who are promoting their product-service system (PSS) development. Currently, improvements in both digital customization and sustainability for various smart PSS categories have been considered rarely. This paper addresses this research gap by developing relevant models.

The development trends of customization-oriented PSS are described in a literature review. An in-depth multiple-case study methodology is adopted, and seven manufacturing companies are sampled. The goal is to identify digital customization measures that can be employed on representative smart PSS models and to explore how these models can create sustainable value.

This study provides valuable insights by uncovering a synthesis framework for achieving customization of the product/use/result-oriented smart PSSs, and the relevant representative smart functions are summarized. This identifies how digital customization capabilities can improve sustainability, including direct economic value for customers as well as additional social benefits and environmental improvements during customization.

Currently, the influence of digitalization on customized offerings and the relevant impact on sustainability development have not been fully addressed to date. This study provides comprehensive information with a reference value for digital customization transformation among the three main types of smart PSS.

This study aims to recognize industry 4.0 opportunities and challenges associated with the co-creation of value in industrial services and to propose a theoretical framework for smart industrial services systems.

The authors carried out a systematic literature review based on the systematic search flow method; thereafter, the authors used the content analysis proposed by Bardin (2011) to analyze the resulting portfolio.

The authors identified a total of five industry 4.0 opportunities and five challenges for co-creating value in industrial services. Drawing upon these findings, this paper builds a theoretical framework for the smart industrial services system, in which the industry 4.0 opportunities arise from the digitally mediated inter-firm interactions and the challenges related to the resources of this system.

This study may not have enabled a complete coverage of all existing peer-reviewed articles in the field of value co-creation in industrial services associated with the industry 4.0 technologies. Also, the framework is constrained by being theoretical rather than empirically grounded.

The findings give managers support to devise strategies for overcoming the barriers that impede them from taking advantage of the opportunities offered by industry 4.0 for co-creating value in industrial services.

This paper’s uniqueness is to identify the industry 4.0 opportunities and challenges for value co-creation in the context of industrial services and to propose a framework for the smart industrial services system.

This study aims to conduct a comprehensive review and network-based analysis by exploring future research directions in the nexus of circular economy (CE) and sustainable business performance (SBP) in the context of digitalization.

A systematic literature review methodology was adopted to present the review in the field of CE and SBP in the era of digitalization. WOS and SCOPUS databases were considered in the study to identify and select the articles. The bibliometric study was carried out to analyze the significant contributions made by authors, various journal sources, countries and different universities in the field of CE and SBP in the era of digitalization. Further, network analysis is carried out to analyze the collaboration among authors from different countries.

The study revealed that digitalization could be a great help in developing sustainable circular products. Moreover, the customers' involvement is necessary for creating innovative sustainable circular products using digitalization. A move toward the product-service system was suggested to accelerate the transformation toward CE and digitalization.

The paper discusses digitalization and CE practices' adoption to enhance the SP of the firms. This work's unique contribution is the systematic literature analysis and bibliometric study to explore future research directions in the nexus of CE and SP in the context of digitalization. The present study has been one of the first efforts to examine the literature of CE and SBP integration from a digitalization perspective along with bibliometric analysis.

This paper provides the strategic direction and coordination mechanism selection for the intelligent transformation of manufacturing enterprises.

A theoretical framework is developed through grounded theory and case analysis.

Collaboration value is the building block of the intelligent product ecosystem. The ecosystem is upgraded via a path of product coordination, platform coordination and network coordination.

This paper provides a framework for enterprises to build an intelligent product ecosystem.

The proposed intelligent product ecosystem framework is new to the literature and lays down a fruitful avenue for future research.

The emergence of digital transformation in the banking industry gives rise to the challenges of adopting technology and boosting users' confidence in the process. This study mainly explores the roles of operant resources and consumption values in the user's consumption process concerning the fintech-embedded product-service system (FPSS) that provides technologically advanced financial services in South Korea.

This study examines the research model based on users' perceived quality, assessment and recommendation of FPSS. In addition, grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) and consumption value theory (CVT), an extended model is developed to understand the impact of user consumption value on FPSS design. The research model includes both product-service system (PSS) characteristics, i.e. quality and assessment, and user-specific characteristics, i.e. conditional, utilitarian and social values (collectively referred to as user consumption value).

This study finds that information, service and security quality positively affect users' confidence through positive assessment and recommendation intention. All the elements of user consumption value play a positive role in the FPSS user confidence model. In addition, the impact of operant resources on the overall service assessment is further investigated based on the interest of user's service engagement. Notable findings include users that highly engage in FPSS services return higher service assessment when social value, information quality and service quality increase.

Overall, this study provides academic and managerial guidelines for the strategic design of fintech-embedded banking services by considering the roles of PSS and user-specific characteristics in fostering sustainable competitive advantage.

In the age of Industry 4.0, digital advancement is reshaping manufacturing models towards product–service systems (PSS). The drivers, readiness and challenges to move to a PSS model are not well understood, and the exploitation of the digital era presents the gap of this research.

The research was conducted using semi-structured interviews in six manufacturers. Two forum debates were also conducted to supplement and validate the findings.

Social and economic motivations rather than environmental considerations were driving the change to PSS. Digital technologies could be an important driver if manufacturers reached a certain PSS maturity level. A high level of technical readiness was offset by a low level of social investments and the strategic development of human resources. Value co-creation was a main challenge though manufacturers had the advantage of digital connectivity, which indicated new human requirements; the greater the enabling power of digital technologies, the greater the need for advanced human skills.

Human resource management has underpinned lean models; yet, the role of employees within PSS is underdeveloped despite the impact of staff in exploiting digitalisation and value co-creation. A “learning organisation” and socio-technical fit are required for the “diffusion of innovation” of PSS.

This research attempted to explore drivers, readiness and challenges for PSS from a socio-technical systems (STS) perspective. Three levels of PSS maturity with STS features were derived from the research, providing guidance for manufacturers.

Smart manufacturing is the prime gripper for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. Smart manufacturing systems (SMSs) largely determine how smart manufacturing evolves in technical and organizational dimensions and how it realizes values in products, production or services. SMSs are growing rapidly and receiving tons of attention from academic research and industrial practice. However, the development of SMSs is still in its fancy, and many issues wait to be identified and solved, such as single point failures, low transparency and ineffective resource sharing. Blockchain, an emerging technology deriving from Bitcoin, is competent to aid SMSs to conquer troubles due to its decentralization, traceability, trackability, disintermediation, auditability and etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the blockchain applications in SMSs, seek out the challenges faced by blockchain-enabled SMSs (BSMSs) and provide referable research directions and ideas.

A comprehensive literature review as a survey is conducted in this paper. The survey starts by introducing blockchain concepts, followed by the descriptions of a literature review method and the blockchain applications throughout the product life cycle in SMSs. Then, the key issues and challenges confronting BSMSs are discussed and some possible research directions are also proposed. It finally presents qualitative and quantitative descriptions of BSMSs, along with some conclusions and implications.

The findings of this paper present a deep understanding about the current status and challenges of blockchain adoption in SMSs. Furthermore, this paper provides a brand new thinking for future research.

This paper minutely analyzes the impacts that blockchain exerts on SMSs in view of the product life cycle, and proposes using the complexity science thinking to deal with BSMSs qualitatively and quantitatively, including tackling the current major problems BSMSs face. This research can serve as a foundation for future theoretical studies and enterprise practice.