Product-related services in manufacturing firms: a Design Thinking perspective
Event Date: 9 March 2018
Speaker: Martin Spring, Lancaster University Management School
Time: 3.30pm
Location: CW406b
Title: Product-related services in manufacturing firms: a Design Thinking perspective
Abstract:
The incorporation of service elements into the total offering of manufacturing firms is a strategy that is increasingly widely adopted, and a vibrant rea of research in operations management and industrial marketing. While this ‘shift to service’ or ‘servitisation’ among manufacturing firms has been explored from the point of view of organisation design, business model innovation and capabilities development, relatively little is known about how the service elements provided by manufacturing firms are designed. This paper is an attempt to explore that, drawing on ‘Design Thinking’, an approach rooted in design studies, but increasingly being adopted in business and management scholarship. The paper presents and explores findings from case studies in six manufacturing firms supplying business markets.
Biography: Martin Spring is Professor of Operations Management at Lancaster University Management School, UK, where he is also Director of the Centre for Productivity & Efficiency. He combines his main research interest in business-to-business services, service supply chains, service triads and coordination in service networks with a wider interest in industrial policy and productivity. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, the Journal of Supply Chain Management and the International Journal of Operations & Production Management, and publishes in these journals and in others in related fields, such as the Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management and Industrial Marketing Management. He is also heavily involved in business and policy engagement, working with, amongst others, the Cabinet Office, Northwest Business Leadership Team, and a range of businesses, large and small, in various sectors.
Published: 8 March 2018
