Transcript

TIM MCALOONE

I’m Professor of Product Service Systems here at the Technical University of Denmark. In particular, I focus on sustainable product service systems, so both the analysis of existing service systems but also design of new, integrated, product service systems. I’m going to basically describe a little bit about, for me, the understanding of a product and a service and a system. A product, for me, is the result of a development process. And it’s typically a type of a technology, something which is designed and something which is transferred in ownership from the producer to the user or the customer.

A service, on the other hand, you could say, very simply described, is an activity which is carried out by one person on behalf of another person. So, a service could be, if I had some type of an activity which I’d prefer to have done on my behalf, then I would find another person to do it for me - very, very simply described. And the service is normally non-tangible but has a relationship, of course, to products or technology, quite often.

A system, for me, is a collection of infrastructure and lots of different people with different roles. And that system is also calling upon products and services. So there’s - the system is also a collection of this infrastructure and the people in a particular context.

Maybe if I give an example of the interrelation between products, services and systems - take a lawn mower. Most of us have one of those or have seen one of those at home. If we take the product’s dimension of a lawn mower, it’s very simple to understand the technology behind a lawn mower, or at least understand that it’s an object which has been designed and developed, and that we can purchase in a garden shop or a DIY shop. And we take it home and we cut the grass with it. And we draw out the value we need in that product ourselves as the purchaser and the user.

Let’s say that I don’t have time to cut my grass, or I’ve got a bad back, or something happens, and I’d like somebody else to cut the grass for me. I could ring to a gardener. And the gardener could come and give me the service of actually cutting the grass. He could do it with my lawn mower. He could do it with his own lawn mower, which is maybe more professional.

If you look at the system elements in that, what now if I said to the gardener, well, actually I’d like you to do my whole garden for me. And, in fact, all my neighbours would like to do that too. So they call the same gardening company.

Maybe they’ll cut the hedge. They’ll cut the grass. And they have very different demands on the products, all of a sudden, because the technology needs to be able to be used not once per week, but four, five, six hours per day. The other thing is, from a people perspective, we need to have some way of organising the different people - my neighbours, the gardener, the different ordering system, the payment system. That becomes a complex but systemic approach.

And then from the infrastructure perspective, we’d need to understand how does the gardener get the machinery out to us? And how do they store it? And what is the maintenance infrastructure, and so forth? So from a very simple lawn mower, you can see that you can build a service and you can build an integrated product service system, which necessarily needs to build some new elements of infrastructure, of different types of people we need to understand, of service elements, and then finally, also, the product.

We’re living in an interesting world at the moment because we’re digitising, we’re dematerialising, and we’re servitising all at the same time. Many companies who have, for many years, been known as product manufacturers are suddenly selling services. At the same time, many organisations which have been - we could view as service organisations - for example, a bank or an insurance company - are all of a sudden calling their offerings ‘products’.

If you take, for example, apps. We’re all using apps today on our smartphones. An app, you could say, is a type of a boundary object between the product and the service. So maybe we have some products which are for sale and some services which we’re hoping to get, and the app, for me, is one component in that. A type of a product, you could say, in order to enable the delivery of that service.