The Effects Of Technological Trajectory In Product Centric Firms Upon The Transition To Smart Service Provision – The Case Of Smart Solar Photovoltaic (Pv) | Kwok L. Shum & Chihiro Watanabe

In light of an emerging paradigm of service provision leading the manufactured products getting smarter and smarter, this paper takes the smart service paradigm as a departure point and explores factors that may influence the transition to smart service provision for product centric industrial manufacturers. The key contention is that smart service involves increasing activities of inter-firms coordination. However, some smart service strategies are relatively standalone product centric while other are more concerned about opportunities that cannot be tapped by a single standalone product or vendor. Manufacturers? existing firm governance structures, which influence its coordination capability, may therefore influence the choice of smart service strategies. The case of solar photovoltaic (PV) is taken to demonstrate the hypothetical view. Industry structures of the PV industry are compared for Japan and the US in the context of respective institutionalized profession based productive organization. Japan?s vertical integrated structure which is due to a closed mass PV deployment model may facilitate the firms to take a product innovation approach to meet the hardware requirement for smart services. On the other hand, US?s fragmented industry structure, mediated by industry standards in an open PV deployment model, may facilitate the industry to take a decentralized and software-based approach to meet emerging service variety requirements?@for smart services. Innovation during the digital-based smart service era is therefore both enabled and constrained by the previous technological trajectories associated in different deployment models.