Smart dust for smart(er) industrial product-service-systems : three strategies and their application

The nascent technology of smart dust—miniaturized sensor networks—promises high value to advance industrial product-service-systems. While previous studies have identified smart dust as source for product and service innovation, the pathways from an initial offering to smart dust-enhanced product-service-systems have received scant attention. The present work in the scope of a Swiss National Science Foundation project on the economic potentials of this technology aims to conceptualize and apply strategies for smart dust-enhanced product-service-systems. This conceptual research resulted in the three pathways (1) product-driven strategy, (2) service-driven strategy and (3) holistic strategy which could be successfully mapped to the use case “Monitoring of structures“. In closing, this emerging technology helps to make industrial product-service-systems more customer- and user-oriented as called by recent voices. To science, we introduce smart dust in the field of product-service-systems and offer a first systemization of pathways, thus contribute to the product-service-systems engineering knowledge base. To practice, we provide useful approaches to be applied at a strategy level to push the servitization in manufacturing forward.