7th International Conference on Business Servitization (ICBS 2018 - Lisbon)

This book of abstracts summarizes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Business Servitization (ICBS 2018), held at the NOVA School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal.

In this edition the conference’s focal theme has been Make, buy or partner: Paradoxes in product service innovation. With this theme the event aimed at discussing through what drivers, processes and actors play a crucial role in enabling and promoting collaborative technological upgrading and product-service innovation. Servitization and the benefits of knowledge-intensive service provision do not necessarily have to be fully integrated within the manufacturer’s internal value chain, therefore it is important to understand how the various forms of collaboration like strategic outsourcing, strategic alliances, joint ventures and other types of partnerships not only facilitate the upgrading of existing manufacturing competences, but also offer an opportunity to develop and anchor technological and service capabilities across partnering firms.

In this 7th edition of the ICBS we have brought together 50 researchers from 28 Universities and Research Institutes located in 14 countries across Europe and America. In summary, the conference is organized in eleven different parallel sessions that seek to fuel the academic debate around the different aspects of Servitization.

Additionally, this conference welcomes relevant keynote speakers as Prof. Miguel Pina e Cunha (NOVA SBE) and Prof. Marko Kohtamäki (University of Vaasa) providing their views on how paradoxes lenses can be used to increase our understanding of product-service innovation.