The platform: Sharing assets among solutions

Papers 2 and 3 identify different assets that might be shared among solutions. As previously noted, a platform strategy entails sharing assets among a set of offerings in the same family (Meyer & Utterback, 1993; Robertson & Ulrich, 1998). This thesis suggests that a platform for solutions might comprise knowledge about usage and about technology as assets to be leveraged. In turn, it also argues that because product–service solutions involve a shift in the activities undertaken in the value chain, the knowledge retained by the solution-providing company has to be extended. Especially, the shift in activities executed by the solution provider calls for more extensive knowledge about usage and users.

Paper 2 underscores the need to focus on users and usages to identify the key needs of customers. To that, Paper 3 adds that knowledge about usage is important for a solution platform. To start with the problem instead of with the product reflects a so called solution-oriented mindset (Sawhney, 2006), and although knowledge about users is essential in individual service and product development (e.g. Magnusson, 2009; von Hippel, 1994), it becomes especially relevant when developing product–service solutions by taking a platform approach. In that process, the costs of acquiring sufficiently in-depth knowledge about usage are greater than in the process of providing products, because extensive knowledge is needed about the customer’s overall operations,

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including its business logic, daily work, and use of other products. Paper 1 offers an example of the development of knowledge about users and usage: Beta has focused on one segment in its development efforts in seeking to make its solution business scalable. The reason for that pursuit is to be able to focus and develop profound knowledge of the user—that is, nurses—in a specific context. Beta conducted user studies of nurses to incorporate a strong focus on them as users of solutions, and in the process, the company discovered that facilitating workflows in healthcare necessitates an emphasis on the work of nurses, including how they move around facilities, who they speak with, what they focus on, and what annoyed them. Their work, of course, is not concerned with Beta’s products only but also with other products used in their various operations. Gamma also emphasises users in its solutions (Paper 3), who could have similar needs across a range of industries. Accordingly, a platform based on knowledge about usage could accommodate a solution family that targets the behaviour of specific users. Such a platform could even mean that a benchmark of an arguably optimal usage process can be defined—for example, by comparing different users—as discussed in Paper 3.

If knowledge about usage is understood in relation to the platform categories proposed by Robertson and Ulrich (1998), then knowledge platforms seem to be closely associated with platforms based upon people and their relationships, because knowledge about usage appears to be concerned, even largely so, with tacit knowledge (e.g. Nonaka, 1994). Knowledge about usage is commonly held by individuals, who develop it in relationships with others, including both customers and partners. To leverage that knowledge, Gamma relies upon individuals with extensive experience and knowledge about usage (e.g. in Paper 3). Thus, although a focus on the customer has been commonly highlighted in relation to solutions—for instance, to justify customer-centric organisations (Galbraith, 2002)—the findings of this thesis indicate that such a focus concerns not only knowledge about customers in general but knowledge about users in particular. Accordingly, individuals with such knowledge should play prominent role in solution development, especially in designing platforms for solutions, because they have accumulated knowledge about usage from their experiences, which can be leveraged on.

Although the costs of gaining in-depth knowledge about usage to develop solutions are likely to exceed the costs of gaining knowledge about developing products, they can be lower when a platform approach is used than when unique solutions are developed. After all, the effects of

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economies of scale and scope that could be achieved by leveraging such knowledge can be used for many individual product–service solutions. The abilities to do so, however, are associated with the ability to identify core underlying problems to be addressed. Such problems could, for instance, be associated with so-called ‘alarm fatigue’ of nurses (e.g. in Paper 1), downtime for users, no matter the reason (e.g. in Papers 2 and 3), or lack of information about the vehicles and the auxiliary equipment in combination (e.g. in Paper 5). Because those problems do not simply concern the core products of the providers, knowledge about usage extends the scope of individual products, while knowledge about them can be used to address more general problems among customers. Although a range of different platforms have been suggested, product platforms remain the most commonly discussed (Fixson, 2007; Zhang, 2015). In addition to knowledge about usage, this thesis shows, however, that knowledge about technology (Paper 3), instead of simply about components, might be shared among solutions. Therefore, while the installed base might play a vital role, as in Brax and Jonsson’s (2009) model, it appears that in the process of developing a platform for product–service solutions, knowledge about technology is more important to leverage than the products per se.

Considering that customers buy products to gain access to competences and knowledge (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) rather than to get hold of the actual products, they use solutions to gain benefits from knowledge obtained by the solution provider. Knowledge about technology is one type of knowledge that customers’ may be willing to pay for in order to access it. Such thinking aligns with the argument that problem-solving is concerned with knowledge about both users and usage, which is associated with the problem, and knowledge about technology, which is associated with solving that problem (Magnusson, 2009; von Hippel, 1994). This thesis argues that companies should leverage and expand upon those kinds of knowledge by positioning them as a basis for their platforms. Compared to knowledge about usage, knowledge about technology seems to be somewhat more easily expressed in words and is thus part of explicit knowledge. It can also be partly embodied in products, and while such knowledge might dominate in a product-oriented setting (e.g. Paper 4), in the development of a platform, it is important to consider knowledge about both usage and technology and how they relate to each other. Whether emphasis is put on one or the other initially however seems to be determined by the approach taken to develop the platform.

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In general, to facilitate the integration of product and service development and the incorporation of both domains of knowledge, it appears that verification and testing activities are assigned an increasingly important role. Such activities are considered early in the development process, with an increased focus on usage instead of simply technical functionality (Paper 3). In those activities, knowledge about technology and knowledge about usage are connected, and people engaged with both the commercial and technical aspects cooperate to create use cases. Because knowledge creation is concerned with the interaction of explicit and tacit knowledge in addition to them separated (Nonaka, 1991, 1994), such activities seem to create a foundation for the necessary integration of those knowledge-related aspects in the platform.