Besides these tangible / intangible aspects, we need something else to be able to clearly distinguish between goods and services. With a PSS, the interaction between supplier and customer can take place not only before or during the purchase but at many times during a PSS’ life cycle. This is one of the main motives to consider PSSs, as this allows for a longer relationship between supplier and customer. This then is the second dimension which helps us distinguish between products and services: the degree to which recurrent interaction between producer and customers contributes to the value of the offering.
Bram Kuijken— 1982 b. kuijken @ uva. nl
. PhD candidate Amsterdam
Business School, Strategy and Marketing, Design contribution to PSS classification. Member CRISP project CASD
The matrix shows the( non) tangible characteristics on the vertical axis and the importance of interaction on the horizontal. The arrows signal that these dimensions are not dichotomous but continuous: a good is placed according to degree of intangibility and interaction.
We consider a combination to be a PSS when( a) it has more than one good / service with a( potential) separate final market and( b) the elements in the combination come from different quadrants of the 2x2 matrix. We think that a product-service system is most pure when the original component offerings contrast maximally, that is, when offerings come from the lower-left and upper-right quadrants of the matrix. p32
GRIP project
Learning what a PSS is, and what its building blocks are helps us to understand what we are dealing with. In the GRIP project we try to build a process to design such a PSS.