An explorative multiple case study of smart-circular PSS - status quo in industry

The business as usual is not yet decoupled from current environmentally damaging value creation. This raises the continuous need for new solutions to allow for the operationalization of R-strategies. One specific approach is the establishment of smart-circular Product-Service-Systems considering all three sustainability strategies – efficiency, consistency and sufficiency – in the entire product lifecycle. Within this multiple case study, 30 existing use cases from different industries, which are already interconnected PSS, were analysed in detail using the following criteria: Level of sustainability reporting, B2B or B2C, product focus, sustainable PSS types, classification of smart PSS elements and the realization of R-strategies subdivided into smart and conventional operationalization. Descriptions in the websites, videos and sustainability reports of the respective PSS providers served as the data source for this multiple case study. In addition, to the authors further data collection, using the replication logic of Yin, seven case studies from the scientific literature dealing with the topic of implementation of PSS were an inspiration and some of the use cases have been used for this paper. To validate the above criteria, 30 PSS providers were contacted, 6 of whom responded and confirmed the assessment. The main results were: Findings of the analysed criteria and future research directions.