Commonalities and Particularities of PSS Design Process and Design Thinking

Shifting from product-oriented business models to product-service systems (PSS) requires changes and implementation of new ideas related to many business dimensions, such as cultural, procedural, financial, and technological. Searching for new solutions requires creativity. Therefore, the application of a design thinking (DT) approach might help companies in finding innovative value propositions for PSS. DT has the potential to support PSS design processes, even though some practitioners may see DT as a substitute to formalized PSS design processes. In order to understand if and how DT can be used in combination with PSS design process models, this work proposes to identify what are the commonalities and particularities of them. The descriptions of DT methodologies and PSS design process models were treated as a structured content corpus, which was divided in comparable activities based on corpus linguistics and frame semantics. The main findings show that DT is effectively a support and not a replacement to the PSS design process, representing greater integration opportunities with the front-end of innovation (FEI). The detailing and implementation phases of PSS design process have no intersections with DT methodologies, even though DT can be employed whenever creativity is needed.