Association of Product-Service Systems Design Concepts with Business Models and their Evaluation Method

To provide personalized values centered around products, Product-Service Systems (PSS) are designed combining product elements and service elements in a tightly integrated manner. Through PSSs, manufacturing companies will achieve business innovation to strengthen their competitiveness in highly challenging market situations and to provide diversified values to consumers and customers. To design PSSs, new methods for designing activities of service receivers and providers and for organizing those activities in meaningful groups for effective management of service designing and service provision would be needed. Moreover those new PSS concepts should be compared and evaluated in the design phase. This paper proposes a method to associate PSS design concepts with their business models by relating service units with business aspect strategies and to evaluate business models using the system dynamics method. The method is illustrated using a PSS design case.