Browsing by Subject "Industry 4.0"

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Cultural change in servitization
(2025) Biesinger, Benjamin; Hadwich, Karsten
Manufacturers are increasingly transforming into industrial service providers. Driven by product commoditization and rapid technology cycles, they increasingly compete on value delivered to customers by shifting their business model to integrated solutions with advanced services. The phenomenon coined servitization can be a powerful engine for manufacturers to grow beyond their traditional product business. Since product and service businesses operate on a fundamentally different logic, servitization requires changes in manufacturers’ deep-rooted organizational beliefs, values and behaviors. Accordingly, creating a culture that supports servitization is critical. Cultural change is widely recognized in servitization research but remains poorly understood. While literature increasingly contributes to understanding “what” values and behaviors that support servitization, insights into “how” change processes shape servitization cultures remain limited. Aiming to support academics and practitioners addressing cultural change in servitization, this dissertation examines how manufacturers change their organizational culture as they transform into industrial service providers and the practices that facilitate the change process. Section 1 presents an overview of industrial and academic perspective on the challenges of cultural change in servitization. Content challenges involve conceptualizing the multiple layers of servitization culture, synthesizing existing concepts and constructs, and expanding digital and learning culture frameworks. Process challenges focus on integrating organizational and sociocognitive theories while identifying holistic change practices. Context challenges center on understanding the role of service-driven mergers and acquisitions, digital technologies and ecosystems, and the transformative shift toward resilience and sustainability. Building on these academic challenges, the section concludes by outlining the dissertation’s aims and structure to address them. Section 2, “Cultural change in servitization – a conceptual review and framework,” concerns the content and process of social construction as servitizing manufacturers change their culture. The article integrates organizational and sociopsychological theories to develop an organizational learning framework for cultural change, explaining the emergence and interaction of organizational and member-level concepts. Second, the framework guides a systematic literature review to integrate fragmented knowledge on cultural change in servitization and establish conceptual order. The article presents 12 propositions, revealing three major cultural orientations (service, digital and learning) and offering guidance for managing organizational and member-level change. Section 3, “The role of strategic and learning orientation in creating competitive advantage through digital service innovation,” concerns fostering organizational learning to drive digital service innovation. The conceptual article integrates recent advances in digital servitization and organizational learning within the resource-based and dynamic capabilities view. It challenges prior assumptions in the field by conceptualizing learning orientation as a moderator of strategic digital, service and innovation orientation to drive servitization performance. The article presents four propositions on the cultural antecedents and conditions, offering guidance for change management to achieve competitive advantage and resilience through digital service innovation. Section 4, “Path towards servitization culture: Unveiling the organizational learning practices to support the cultural change from product manufacturing to independent service provision,” concerns a manufacturer’s cultural change to become a leading independent service provider through service-driven M&A, internationalization and corporate restructuring. The article gathers data from interviews and company documents to obtain a dynamic view of cultural change in servitization. The in-depth, long-term single case study identifies three cultural streams permeating culture during the transformation: independent service orientation, customer orientation and entrepreneurial learning orientation. The organizational learning practices to freeze the emerging ISP culture, rebalance the global ISP culture and unfreeze the ISP learning culture offer guidance for managing continuous change processes. Section 5 provides a concluding analysis of the articles, deriving theoretical contributions, practical implications and a future research agenda. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation introduces organizational learning as a framework to explore the emergent and human aspects of change in servitization and conceptualizes the servitization culture. Moreover, it extends the notion of continuous change, interorganizational change and servitization culture as a transformative response to technological and societal disruption. For practitioners, this research integrates its findings with prescriptive models of learning organizations to formulate principles for strategies and practices that support the creation of a servitization culture. The research agenda focuses on advancing research on servitization culture in Industry 5.0, extending multilevel research and introducing configuration and intervention as a research strategy for cultural change in servitization.
Leveraging digital technologies in logistics 4.0: insights on affordances from intralogistics processes
(2024) Albrecht, Tobias; Baier, Marie-Sophie; Gimpel, Henner; Meierhöfer, Simon; Röglinger, Maximilian; Schlüchtermann, Jörg; Will, Lisanne
Emerging digital technologies are transforming logistics processes on a large scale. Despite a growing body of knowledge on individual use cases ranging from collaborative robots to platform-based planning systems in the frontline industrial development of Logistics 4.0, organizations lack a systematic understanding of the opportunities digital technologies afford for logistics processes. To foster such understanding, this study takes an intra-organizational perspective as a central starting point for digitalization initiatives toward Logistics 4.0. It synthesizes current academic research and industrial insights from a systematic literature review and an expert interview study through an affordance lens. The result is a catalog and conceptual framework of ten digital technology affordances in intralogistics (DTAILs) and 46 practical manifestations. Thereby, this study contributes to understanding and leveraging the opportunities digital technologies afford in a leading-edge information systems application domain. It serves as a foundation for further theorizing on Logistics 4.0 and for structuring strategic discussions among organizational stakeholders.
Strategische Innovationskommunikation
ein phasenbasiertes Konzept für die Kommunikation von Innovationen in Unternehmen am Beispiel der digitalen Transformation und Industrie 4.0
(2019) Krugsberger, Stefanie; Brettschneider, Frank
The aim of this dissertation was to show how an integrated corporate communication can create acceptance for innovations. Innovations were especially studied in the field of communication science at the beginning of the 21st century. After that the research decreased. However, some research gaps remained open, which were not pursued to this day. This includes, for example, a strategic approach that takes into account the external perspective of the acceptance process, or concrete theories for the application of corporate communications in the form of concepts. In addition, it is questionable whether the findings from the 21st century are still valid. The present study thus contributed to complement the research field of innovation communications on new and current approaches. After discussing the fundamentals of innovation management and innovation communication, an interdisciplinary model was developed: the innovation processing model. With this model a new approach was defined, with which the processing of innovations in the individual can be explained in an interdisciplinary manner. In addition, the approach can supply derivations, how a corresponding communication must be designed so that they contribute positively to the acceptance development process of the individual. For this purpose, different phases of innovation development as well as the diffusion in the market were first defined, which represent a framework for the innovation processing model. A focus was placed on the diffusion phases, since only these are visible to the general public. The basis for the diffusion phases was the model of Rogers “Diffusion of Innovation”. For each of the five phases knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation - a specific communication goal has been defined that must be reached in the phase in order to eventually lead to acceptance. The aim of the knowledge phase is that a potential customer receives information about an innovation and perceives it as well. In the persuasion phase, this information is used so that a positive attitude towards an innovation is formed. In the decision-making phase, communication should help the user to make a positive decision for an innovation, such as purchasing. In the implementation phase, communication ensures that habits in dealing with the use of an innovation develop. In the confirmation phase, the last step is to create a positive attitude towards the innovation. Based on the five phases, interdisciplinary theories were integrated into the model that describe and explain the achievement of the respective communication goal: How do people get information about the innovation, how to form attitudes, how do people make decisions and how do they establish habits? The developed model states that an individual has completed acceptance for an innovation after positive completion of all phases. As this can be concretely implemented, the example of digital transformation and industry 4.0 revealed a fictitious automotive manufacturer, as this topic shows particularly well how currently the innovation communication is. The empirical part of this study consisted of a media content analysis, with which routines of reporting could be identified, that gave an idea on how a concept of strategic innovation communication on the topic of digital transformation and industry 4.0 should be designed. It was possible to find some evidence of how journalists are reporting on the topic of digital transformation and industry 4.0 as well as innovations from this topic area. In addition, the innovation processing model was used to formulate a new approach to the selection of news for innovation topics, which could already be strengthened with the help of the media content analysis. This could be confirmed in particular by qualitative expert interviews with three different journalists.The innovation processing model and the results of the media content analysis developed in the present work offer a further approach for the design of strategic innovation communication, which can be further expanded and validated in future investigations. This dissertation has taken the innovation research a step further.