Examining Servitisation as a Resource Based Competitive Advantage

This paper deals with the advancement ofservitisation in the Italian manufacturing industries, identifying the service offerings, the performances and the dimensions of servitised firms. Data were collected from 7,840 manufacturing firms. The results show that 45.6% of the selected manufacturing firms undertake servitisation. The provision of product-related services supporting the supplier product (SSPs) seems to be advantageous for firms that are not very large, labelled as Product-related servitised firms in the context of this work, because they could exploit existing resources and competencies to create the service offering, enhancing the need for following a resource-based approach to create sustainable competitive advantage.