Balancing customization and standardization in knowledge intensive business services: The use of modular service architectures

Anna Cabigiosu, Diego Campagnolo (), Andrea Furlan () and Giovanni Costa ()
Additional contact information
Diego Campagnolo: Department of Economics and Management, Università di Padova
Andrea Furlan: Department of Economics and Management, Università di Padova
Giovanni Costa: Department of Economics and Management, Università di Padova

No 11, Working Papers from Venice School of Management - Department of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Abstract: While the mainstream literature on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) has long emphasized their customized nature and their role in exploring new knowledge to satisfy each client's needs, recent research has argued that competition is inducing KIBS firms to standardize their offer. In this paper, we concentrate on a particular type of KIBS firms, third-party logistic service providers (TPLs), and analyze how two TPLs face the customization-standardization trade-off by using service architectures. We find that TPLs do not trade off customization for standardization, instead they manage to pursue both simultaneously relying on modular services, which constitutive elements are standard procedures. Service modularity enables the TPL to exploit its existing knowledge base while only some knowledgeable clients prompt TPLs to explore new procedures. Overall, our results suggest that service customization and knowledge exploration can be separated. TPLs should manage their customer relationships using a portfolio approach, balancing supply relationships in which they replicate existing services with partnership-based relationships with competent customers in which they develop new procedures. Managing the temporal separation between exploration and exploitation consequently becomes a core competence.

Keywords: Services; Innovation; Performance; Standard services; Modular services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2012-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino and nep-knm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://virgo.unive.it/wpideas/storage/2012wp11.pdf First version, 2012 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to virgo.unive.it:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vnm:wpdman:24

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Venice School of Management - Department of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daria Arkhipova ().