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As multinational manufacturing companies pursue service innovation toward global markets, their back-end development units-headquarters R&D-face immense challenges due to market heterogeneity. Our extensive studies of 13 leading multinational companies in service innovation have identified, analyzed, and ranked challenges to reveal the key steps to building necessary capabilities. Based on our analysis, we inductively identified four competencies in global service innovation capabilities (developing customer insights, integrating global knowledge, creating global service offerings, and building a digitalization capability) and the activities associated with them. Global service innovation requires companies to develop capabilities that support increased relationship intensity and interaction between headquarters R&D and local units, customers, and service partners. In developing these capabilities, the headquarters units progressively learn to collaborate, integrate, and orchestrate processes and activities across and within regional front-end units, customers, and service partners.

PurposeThe dominant-view within servitization literature presupposes a progressive transition from product to service orientation. In reality, however, many manufacturing firms maintain both product and service orientations throughout their servitization journey. Using the theoretical lens of organizational ambivalence, the purpose of this paper is to explore the triggers, manifestation and consequences of these conflicting orientations.Design/methodology/approachA multiple case study method was used to analyze five large manufacturing firms that were engaged in servitization. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 respondents across different functions within these firms.FindingsServitizing firms experience organizational ambivalence during servitization because of co-existing product and service orientations. This paper provides a framework that identifies the triggers of this ambivalence, its multi-level manifestation and its consequences. These provide implications for explaining why firms struggle to implement servitization strategies due to co-existing product and services orientations. Understanding organizational ambivalence, provides opportunity to manage related challenges and can be vital to successful servitization.Originality/valueConsidering the theoretical concept of ambivalence could advance the understanding of the effects and implications of conflicting orientations during servitization in manufacturing firms.

In this paper, we employ a sensemaking lens to expand research on when and how local communities mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility. We draw on data from Guji, Ethiopia, where a local community suffered damages caused by a gold mine. We found that community members establish temporarily stable, emotion-driven sensemaking accounts that shape the community’s beliefs about the causes of the damage they experience and the prospects of a potential mobilization. Upsetting such sensemaking accounts requires sense-breaking events, which lead to a shift in dominant emotions and a re-evaluation of company behavior, whereupon the community settles into new, again relatively stable interpretations of events. We discuss how environmental cues, sensemaking, emotions, and actions, on both the individual and the community level, intersect, potentially leading to dominant sensemaking accounts and dominant emotions in the local community. We develop a model depicting how, through action, observation, and discussion, a local community develops an impetus to mobilize. This theorization addresses how emotions shift in local communities subjected to corporate social irresponsibility and how emotions energize or de-energize a community. Thus, the study contributes to our understanding of why and how local communities mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility and extends extant work on emotional dynamics in the transition between individual and collective sensemaking.

Manufacturing firms struggle to break away from their pre-existing business models, offerings, routines, and capabilities. The present study used path dependency as a theoretical lens to investigate a single longitudinal case study of a leading manufacturing company based on in-depth interviews with senior executives and managers. The analysis contributes to extending the digital servitization and path-dependence literature by proposing four path-breaking mechanisms: (1) organizational reconfiguration, (2) reconfiguration of value offerings, (3) opportunity exploration, and (4) knowledge reconfiguration. The framework developed based on these mechanisms generated valuable insights for manufacturing firms seaking to to break away from their dominant paths.

Purpose The dominant-view within servitization literature presupposes a progressive transition from product to service orientation. In reality, however, many manufacturing firms maintain both product and service orientations throughout their servitization journey. Using the theoretical lens of organizational ambivalence, the purpose of this paper is to explore the triggers, manifestation and consequences of these conflicting orientations. Design/methodology/approach A multiple case study method was used to analyze five large manufacturing firms that were engaged in servitization. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 respondents across different functions within these firms. Findings Servitizing firms experience organizational ambivalence during servitization because of co-existing product and service orientations. This paper provides a framework that identifies the triggers of this ambivalence, its multi-level manifestation and its consequences. These provide implications for explaining why firms struggle to implement servitization strategies due to co-existing product and services orientations. Understanding organizational ambivalence, provides opportunity to manage related challenges and can be vital to successful servitization. Originality/value Considering the theoretical concept of ambivalence could advance the understanding of the effects and implications of conflicting orientations during servitization in manufacturing firms.

As multinational manufacturing companies pursue service innovation toward global markets, their back-end development units-headquarters R&D-face immense challenges due to market heterogeneity. Our extensive studies of 13 leading multinational companies in service innovation have identified, analyzed, and ranked challenges to reveal the key steps to building necessary capabilities. Based on our analysis, we inductively identified four competencies in global service innovation capabilities (developing customer insights, integrating global knowledge, creating global service offerings, and building a digitalization capability) and the activities associated with them. Global service innovation requires companies to develop capabilities that support increased relationship intensity and interaction between headquarters R&D and local units, customers, and service partners. In developing these capabilities, the headquarters units progressively learn to collaborate, integrate, and orchestrate processes and activities across and within regional front-end units, customers, and service partners.

OVERVIEW: As multinational manufacturing companies pursue service innovation toward global markets, their back-end development units--headquarters R&D--face immense challenges due to market heterogeneity. Our extensive studies of 13 leading multinational companies in service innovation have identified, analyzed, and ranked challenges to reveal the key steps to building necessary capabilities. Based on our analysis, we inductively identified four competencies in global service innovation capabilities (developing customer insights, integrating global knowledge, creating global service offerings, and building a digitalization capability) and the activities associated with them. Global service innovation requires companies to develop capabilities that support increased relationship intensity and interaction between headquarters R&D and local units, customers, and service partners. In developing these capabilities, the headquarters units progressively learn to collaborate, integrate, and orchestrate processes and activities across and within regional front-end units, customers, and service partners.