关键词: 数字服务化, 内涵解析, 研究演进, 整合框架

Abstract: Digital servitization is a strategy that has received considerable attention from both the scholarly community and practitioners nowadays. However, research in this area remains fragmented and dispersed across different research streams. Currently, research on digital servitization is predominantly found in international journals focusing on operations management, marketing management, and strategic management. There is scarce literature from China that treats digital servitization as an independent concept; instead, it tends to embed digital servitization within research on digital transformation, hindering further in-depth exploration of digital servitization. Therefore, this article collects evidence from published international literature and uses econometric analysis tools as auxiliary means to elucidate the connotation of digital servitization, streamline its knowledge framework, explore its future research directions, and thereby construct an integrated theoretical framework.
Following a logic of “content analysis—research evolution—framework establishment”, this paper analyzes 227 documents in English on digital servitization sourced from Web of Science (2009—2022), yielding the following conclusions: First, existing research exhibits a broad understanding of the connotation of digital servitization without a widely accepted definition. This study identifies four core elements of digital servitization and defines it as the process by which manufacturing firms create or reconfigure service models through the use or embedding of digital technologies. Second, research on digital servitization has evolved with the gradual fusion of two research domains-digitalization and servitization. The first stage involved exploring the relationship between ICT and service innovation as independent concepts; the second stage advanced to analyzing digitalization and servitization as two independent yet interconnected concepts; the third stage focused on the concept of digital servitization itself. Third, this study summarizes five thematic research areas of digital servitization, namely context, capabilities, models, linkages, and outcomes, and proposes future research directions focusing on digital service ecosystem governance, the correlation between AI capabilities and digital servitization, the impact of data paradox on digital servitization, and value co-creation in digital servitization among multinational customers, service providers, and suppliers. Last, this paper constructs an integrated research framework where big data analytics capability acts as an antecedent, modular solution innovation serves as an intermediary mechanism, and customer/supplier/government involvement acts as boundary conditions, ultimately leading to the upgrading of servitized manufacturers as outcomes.
The theoretical contribution: firstly, it vividly portrays the gradual fusion process of digitalization and servitization, thereby enhancing the clarification of the research development trajectory of digital servitization and promoting the establishment of a specific research stream for digital servitization. Secondly, it identifies major themes of digital servitization and its future research directions to deepen the research on digital servitization. Thirdly, it establishes an integrated research framework for digital servitization“big data analytics capability—modular solution innovation—customer/supplier/government involvement—firm upgrade”,which can serve as an analytical basis or inspiration for future case studies or empirical research on digital servitization.

Key words: Digital Servitization, Connotation, Research Trajectory, Integrated Framework