Business practice shows that manufacturing firms recently strive for securing and enhancing
their competitive position by overcoming their traditional product-centric way of acting and
employing a service-related strategy. This product-service transition provides benefits for
manufacturing firms such as differentiation opportunities, a new source of revenues, as well
as the option to create a better fit to changed customer behavior. However, many
manufacturing firms are not able to benefit from a service-related strategy as they fail to
establish a business model that supports product-service transition and therefore experience
difficulties in operationalizing such a strategy. However, research has by now not paid
sufficient attention to the identification of business models that support product-service
transition and to the change process that comes along with implementing a new business
model. Moreover, research on product-service transition usually focuses on various servicerelated
aspects and analyzes them in isolation. Such a decoupled analysis does not foster a
holistic understanding how manufacturing firms can benefit from service-related strategies.
By employing the business model as a new unit of analysis and using qualitative-empirical
research, this thesis (1) overcomes the narrow, unidimensional focus on product-service
transition as it provides evidence that manufacturing firms employ different service strategies
that are reflected in different distinct business model configurations in order to pursue
product-service transition; (2) analyzes business model change processes in established
manufacturing firms in detail and shows that business model change in the context of productservice
transition is very often an incremental and emergent process; (3) highlights
antecedents that influence a manufacturing firm’s business model design choice as well as
barriers that decelerate the business model change process in the context of product-service
transition.