Comparing PSS Design Models Based on Content Analysis

The combination of products and services in an integrated offer that delivers value through the provision of a required function is recognized as an important strategy for competitiveness and environmental perspectives. Despite its benefits, the design of a Product-Service System (PSS) is considered more challenging than the design of pure products and services. There are proposals of generic models of PSS design processes to support companies when creating their specific models. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the five most cited generic process models, addressing a level of granularity based on process activities, meanwhile other studies have mostly stopped at the phase level. It employed a content analysis approach to perform the comparative analysis. The results show that the analyzed process models prioritize activities related to “Conceptualization” and “Technical Development (Product, Service and Software, Integration)” categories of the PSS design. They also focus on different parts of these categories, being complementary to each other. Thus, this study suggests that companies should not choose only one of them as a reference to create its own PSS design process, but they should look for elements of different models that fit to their purposes and characteristics. At the end, perspectives for future research are discussed.