Paper info

How digital technologies associate with customer-service business models in manufacturing SMEs

Kristian Philipsen , Kent Adsbøll Wickstrøm, Jan Stentoft and Anders Haug

The paper was published at the 35th IMP-conference in Paris, France in 2019.

New digital technologies enable industrial firms to offer new combinations of products and services based on various customer-service business models. Within the interaction approach there has been a call for better understanding of how digital technologies affect business relationships. There has also been a call for better understanding how business models can be understood within a relational and network approach. This paper contributes new understandings of how digital technologies may introduce new relational capabilities to support new business models in customer-service models in SMEs. Based on a quantitative survey including 152 Danish manufacturing SMEs, this study examines the prominence of three customer-service business models and their association with firms’ use of different types of digital technologies.