Productisation: A Literature Review

Janne Harkonen, Harri Haapasalo and Kai Hanninen
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Janne Harkonen: University of Oulu, Finland
Harri Haapasalo: University of Oulu, Finland
Kai Hanninen: University of Oulu, Finland

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Abstract: Purpose: Productisation seems to be a managerial practice as the term is commonly used by practitioners. Industrial managers often comprehend productisation as combining and translating product, or service elements into a whole, that can be offered to customers. Dictionary defines productisation as “the act of modifying something to make it suitable as a commercial product”. However, the literature is not clear with productisation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to combine and analyse all journal articles referring to productisation. The aim is to obtain a better understanding on how the literature understands productisation, and how the discussion is distributed. Design/methodology/approach: This study is founded on a thorough literature search, the approach being content analysis, with two main steps: 1) defining sources and procedures for the searches, and 2) defining categories for classifying the found articles (e.g. Li and Cavusgil, 1995). Keyword searches were conducted through article databases, including; Google Scholar, Scopus, Emerald and Science Direct. The analysed literature contains 185 journal articles. Findings: The analysed articles are divided into five content categories. Productisation of products seems to be the most discussed theme, with 37.3 % of the articles classified into this category. Productisation of services, productisation of software, and productisation of technology are the next most covered with 25.4 %, 17.8 %, and 16.2 % of the articles respectively. Noteworthy is that most articles referring to productisation are relatively new. This study also clarifies the characteristics of productisation as recognised by the articles, together with identifying relevant research interfaces. Research limitations/implications: The limitations of this study include analysing articles found in certain databases, potentially ignoring some important work. The implications include synthesising, and making available the overall state of research surrounding productisation. Originality/value: The authors have not identified similar studies conducted on productisation.

Keywords: productisation; productization; product management; product development; literature review; categorisation; content analysis. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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