Service customisation and standardisation in combinatory knowledge-intensive business services

Marco Bettiol, Eleonora Di Maria and Roberto Grandinetti

International Journal of Knowledge-Based Development, 2015, vol. 6, issue 3, 241-260

Abstract: The trade-off between customisation and standardisation in service offerings has been widely debated in the literatures on service in general and on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) specifically. Moving beyond this trade-off, this paper introduces a new type of service offering, called combinatory KIBS, distinguished by their capability to combine customisation and standardisation. Based on a sample of approximately 500 KIBS, our results show that combinatory KIBS develop specific business strategies which achieve superior performance in customisation and standardisation. They pair customer interaction aimed at service customisation and knowledge codification useful in providing standard services, while also investing in networking.

Keywords: knowledge-intensive business services; service standardisation; service customisation; modularity; combinatory KIBS; business strategies; customer interaction; knowledge codification; networking. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijkbde:v:6:y:2015:i:3:p:241-260

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