Conceptual Guidance on Linking Service Offerings to Sustainability

• Main Authors: Chong-WenChen, 陳崇文
• Other Authors: Chun-Juei Chou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/33013952918849321861

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 工業設計學系 === 103 === Service offerings have great potential to promote sustainability. For companies and business managers, it is important to embed full sustainability concerns (i.e., economic, environmental, and social considerations) in their business models and find more possibilities for creating sustainable offerings. For researchers, it is important to recognize the characteristics of sustainable services and explore approaches to generating innovative service concepts and evaluating the performance of sustainability-led offerings. However, many studies have only focused on environmental benefits when discussing sustainable services offered by product-centric companies, especially with regard to lifecycle management issues. Relating service offerings to the social good or other sustainability issues has received relatively little attention. In addition, there is a lack of multiple criteria used to facilitate the comprehensive assessment of sustainable services. This research presents a conceptual study with theoretical discussions to provide a better understanding of sustainability-led service offerings. The author discusses how product-centric companies integrate sustainability considerations into services and then apply innovative offerings to fulfill customer needs, to generate environmental/social benefits, and to increase business potential. Furthermore, the author proposes guiding principles for developing sustainability-led service offerings. Via the case analysis, the author demonstrates the application of guiding principles and explores important tactics for enhancing the operation of sustainable services. On the other hand, a concept of sustainable product-service efficiency is proposed to explore the relationship between service performance and sustainability impact. This concept provides an index with multiple criteria intended to evaluate whether company’s offerings consist with the sustainability requirements. The author then refers to expert comments to improve and complement the proposed concept. This research concludes that value propositions and the customer context are two crucial factors that must be considered in determining the development of sustainability-led service offerings. To embed a wider range of sustainability values in service offerings, the author suggests that companies expand their attention to customer problems beyond the immediate context of product use. Recognizing the institutional and cultural contexts behind customer problems aids companies in developing offerings that bring not only environmental and social good but also business potential. Moreover, to improve the stability of service offerings for long-term planning, companies should closely take care of employees and their working conditions, which is the key to reducing the social impact of companies’ policies. Finally, the author suggests that risk analysis can be incorporated into the proposed guiding principles and the sustainable product-service efficiency in the future to address radical innovation of business models.