How do manufacturing companies and service providers share knowledge in the context of servitization? An evolutionary-game model of complex networks

Abstract

The digital capabilities driven by Internet of Things and affiliated techniques have enabled the prevailing service-oriented business models, among which servitization has been well recognised as one of the most competitive strategies for manufacturing companies. However, manufacturing companies usually show a lack of knowledge regarding the service offering associated to their manufactured products. Acquiring external knowledge from service providers is one effective way to tackle this problem, but due to the information asymmetry, the process of knowledge sharing between the two is often faced with a prisoner’s dilemma game. Meanwhile, the company’s game strategy will change with the evolution of the knowledge sharing network structure. We therefore consider the influence of group spatial structure on individual game strategy, marry a canonical evolutionary game model on the decision-making mechanism of individuals to the complex network theory on the interaction behaviour among individuals in the groups. By analysing the model, we reveal the influence of various factors under the dimensions of ability and benefit on the willingness of companies to share knowledge. We also demonstrate the divergence in the influence of various factors on different types of companies.

KEYWORDS:

• Product-service systems
• servitization
• knowledge evolution
• evolutionary game
• digitalisation
• value co-creation

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge all the editors and reviewers for their constructive comments which greatly improved the work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Junhu Ruan, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Chinese National Bureau of Statistics: http://www.stats.gov.cn/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Project [grant number 2019YFD1101103]; Key International (Regional) Cooperative Research Projects of NSFC [grant number 72010107002]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71973106, 72071028]; Youth Project of Shaanxi Natural Science Basic Research Program [grant number 2020JQ-283]; Key Project of National Social Science Foundation of China [grant number 21AGL004].

Notes on contributors

Ruize Ma

Ruize Ma is a PhD candidate in Management Science and Engineering from School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China. His research interests include industrial IoT, game theory, servitization and operations management of manufacturing.

Lin Jiang

Lin Jiang is a PhD candidate in Enterprise Management from School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China. Her main research interests include knowledge sharing, servitization and innovation management.

Tianyue Wang

Tianyue Wang is a PhD candidate at the Department of Advanced Design and Systems Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. His research interests include industrial IoT, servitization, and intelligent manufacturing.

Xuping Wang

Xuping Wang received a Ph.D. degree in management science and engineering from the Dalian University of Technology, China, in 2010. He is currently a full-time professor at the School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology. His research interests include IoT based industrial engineering and service op-erations management.

Junhu Ruan

Junhu Ruan received a Ph.D. in management science and engineering from Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China in 2015. He is a full-time professor at the College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, China. He has published papers in IEEE Transactions on industrial informatics, Information Science, Applied Soft Computing, IJPR, IJPE and others, His main research interests include IoT based agricul-ture, data-driven product design, and smart product-service systems.