The April 2015 Monthly Paper, on 'A Capability-Based View of Service Transitions' by Ornella Benedettini, Jane Davies and Andy Neely

Although it is clear that turning to a service-oriented business model requires companies to deploy an adequate set of capabilities, there are concerns that manufacturers may not understand what distinctive capabilities they need in order to successfully integrate vertically from products to services.

This paper describes the initial steps of a study that is examining the cases of 138 companies from the aerospace and defence industry to provide evidence on how manufacturing companies configure and orchestrate service-relevant capabilities in practice. In particular, we focus on the documentation of the capabilities identified by the Alliance ‘Service Capability Audit’ tool and examine their link with composition of the service offering and company’s financial performance. 

By doing this, we seek to show what capabilities manufacturing companies can best leverage in the context of the shift to services. We further seek to provide the Alliance companies with insights on how to achieve the alignment between configuration of the service offering and organisational capabilities. The paper describes how we have set the study up and provides some initial findings.