Innovation in product-service system engineering based on early customer integration and prototyping

Product-Service Systems (PSS) enhance product-centered offers with services and infrastructure in order to provide customer-oriented solutions. These new concepts enable companies to innovate their portfolio, thus supporting creative and adaptable solutions [1]. One of the major challenges is the integrated development of both tangible products and intangible services in respect to their interdependencies. For this reason researchers proposed a versatile set of methods and tools regarding the development of PSS. Nevertheless, two discrepancies can be stated: Firstly, prototyping has been studied inadequately in PSS research so far. For this reason Exner et al. proposed new approaches to fill this gap [2], including remarks to further proceed research with different degrees of technological utilization. Secondly, although customer-orientation and customer integration has been recognized as crucial for PSS, the involvement of clients or consumers in the design process is often disregarded. Consequently, this paper presents an extensive literature research regarding active customer integration and prototyping in PSS design processes. Based on these insights a concept for a new PSS prototyping approach is introduced. The method focuses on PSS concept development including the integration of the customer to evaluate and develop the concepts with intuitive touch technologies.