On the Design of Digitized Industrial Products as Key Resources of Service Platforms for Industrial Service Innovation

The pervasive infiltration of digital technology into physical products fundamentally changes the requirements regarding the design of physical products and their potential for service innovation. To effectively leverage the generative capacity of digitized industrial products in future smart service offerings, proper design decisions must be made when designing today’s products. The purpose of this paper is to report on a 2.5-year action design research project with an industrial forklift manufacturer, a software company, and an IoT consultancy. I elicit meta-requirements of digitized products arising from the industrial service business and derive design principles for digitized industrial products. This work empowers researchers to better understand the importance of generative product design to enable opportunities to innovative services. For managers, this work provides a blueprint for the design of digitized industrial products and raises awareness for generative product design in the digital age.