digital technologies

digital innovation

Industrial Marketing Management

Digitalization is viewed as a source of future competitiveness due to its potential for unlocking new value-creation and revenue-generation opportunities. To profit from digitalization, providers and customers tend to move away from transactional product-centric model to relational service-oriented engagement. This relational transformation is brought about through digital servitization. However, current knowledge about how providers and customers transform their relationship to achieve benefits from digital servitization is lacking. This paper addresses that knowledge gap by applying the relational view theory to a study of four provider-customer relationships engaged in digital servitization. The results provide evidence for four relational components – complementary digitalization capabilities, relation-specific digital assets, digitally enabled knowledge-sharing routines, and partnership governance – that enable providers and customers to profit from digital servitization. A key contribution is the development of a relational transformation framework for digital servitization that provides an overview of how the four relational components evolve as the relationship progresses. In doing so, we contribute to the emerging servitization literature by offering key relational insights into the interdependence of activities throughout the transformation phases of provider-customer relationships in digital servitization. • Complementary digitalization capabilities are key for initiating and preserving a relationship. • Partners invest in relation-specific digital assets to align technologies and develop competence. • Digitally enabled knowledge-sharing routines enhance transparency and utilization of data. • Partnership governance transform to a relational approach to exploit digitalization potential. • We present a relational transformation framework for digital servitization to guide B2B relations.

Transforming provider-customer relationships in digital servitization: A relational view on digitalization