Extending value through product, service and platform innovations

Background and rationale of this special issue Since its beginnings in the late 1970s and 1980s in the fields of industrial marketing and services marketing, and through its consolidation in the 1990s, business relationship research has gained substantial ground in theory and practice (Shostack, 1977; Arndt, 1979; Ford, 1980; Håkansson, 1982; Levitt, 1983a, 1983b; Berry, 1983; Dwyer et al., 1987; Jackson, 1985; Noordewier et al., 1990; Anderson and Narus, 1990, 1991; Heide and John, 1992). This increased relevance was triggered by two fundamental changes: first, with respect to technology, especially in the fields of information and communication technologies, manufacturing and logistics, and second, pivotal transformations in the management of corporations, pushing these to focus on core competencies and cooperation with suppliers, in detriment of vertical integration (Carlsson, 1992; Kleinaltenkamp and Ehret, 2006; Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2015). These changes led manufacturers to decentralize functions, subcontract and outsource noncore tasks and delegate the production of parts to specialized supply firms. As a partial result of this process, during the 1980s, most Western European countries, alongside with the USA and Japan, experienced an increase in smalland medium-sized businesses (SMEs) entering the value chain process as new agents in the delivery of products and services (Loveman and Sengenberger, 1991; Carlsson, 1992; Carree and Thurik, 1998). These national economies have reached a point in manufacturing that is organized into flexible networks of highly specialized firms (Carlsson and Stankiewicz, 1990). In tune with these changes, Lynn Schostack’s “breaking free” of services marketing from goods must push the theory and practice of industrial and B2B marketing into a broader perspective, moving beyond the traditional product-centric views to a more integrative one, encompassing products, services and platforms. Under this view, the central aimmust be to provide better responsiveness to customer needs and market dynamics (Shostack, 1977; Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008; Carlborg et al., 2014; Kindström andKowalkowski, 2014). To some extent, this much-needed shift toward an increase of service-led strategies has been taking place (Bustinza et al., 2015; Baines et al., 2017). Successful manufacturing firms are reaping benefits from servitization, such as growth in revenue and profits, better response to customer needs, increasing customer loyalty or building new revenue streams, among others (Baines et al., 2017), with the clear effect of a blurring of the boundaries between products and services. Service and manufacturing agents are increasingly organizing around platform ecosystems. These are sets of shared technologies and technology standards underlying an organizational structure that operate by giving support to value co-creation specialization and complementary offerings (Thomas et al., 2014). Today, the Internet of Things, namely, the use of machines and objects embedded with miniaturized sensors and other electronic devices in a network enabling them to collect and exchange data, is allowing a multitude of platform ecosystems to not only form and grow but also compete with similar platforms to lead the market. It is not surprising that this phenomenon is raising serious concerns and challenges to established firms and even entire industries. To keep a leading position, incumbent firms will not only have to produce the best products but also need to become leaders in administering platforms or layers of software that combine “devices, data and services on which other firms can build their own offerings” (The Economist, 2015). This is perhaps the main reason behind the rise of recent national manufacturing policies, such as Industrie 4.0 in Germany, the High ValueManufacturing Catapult in UK and similar programs in France, China or Korea. According to the Final Report of the Industrie 4.0 Working Group: “In conjunction with smart production, smart logistics, smart grids and smart products, the increasing use of the Internet of Things and Services in manufacturing will transform value chains and lead to the emergence of new business models” (Kaggermann et al., 2013). Taking note of this context and challenges stemming in industrial marketing and B2B relationships, I am pleased to present this special issue, entitled “Extending value through product, service and platform innovations. ” Some of the ten articles comprising this special issue are originally from a selection of papers presented at the 2016 Center of Business and Industrial Marketing (CBIM) Academic Workshop that was held in Bilbao, Spain, on June 30-July 1, 2016. In this totally international event, a final selection of 40 papers and more than 70 participants from 16 countries were presented. The conference program included seven tracks, one plenary session followed with a roundtable discussion including professors, public officials, guest entrepreneurs and two panel sessions. A few weeks after this event, we also opened a call for papers, inviting authors to submit their manuscripts based on the general message of this lemma.The selected papers are presented below. The first paper entitled, “Openness and front end of innovation: does customer type matter? ” studies two forms of openness, namely, cross-industry networks and customer integration, and their outcomes in the form of creative ideas or product definitions. Using amixed approach based on a series of in-depth interviews with managers, followed by a quantitative analysis of a structural equation model, Barrutia et al. (2018) find that idea creativity in B2B and B2C settings is explained by different external drivers. Whereas in the former, managers should focus on cross-industry networks, in the case of B2C settings customer integration is of key concern. The second paper in this issue, “Industrial marketing research. A bibliometric analysis (1990-2015)” by Valenzuela Fernandez, Nicolas, Merig o and Arroyo-Cañada, develops an analysis across countries and universities for the research field of industrial marketing by looking into the Web of Science The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight. com/0885-8624.htm