Absorptive Capacity and Value Co-Creation in the Transition Toward Digital Product-Service Systems: A Conceptual Model for Manufacturing SMEs

Resumo

Manufacturing firms increasingly seek to complement or replace product sales with digitally enabled services—remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and outcome-based contracts—a transition known as digital servitization. While this shift has been studied extensively in large, technologically advanced firms, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face distinctive obstacles that are only partially captured by existing servitization frameworks, which tend to assume organizational resources that most SMEs do not possess. This article proposes a conceptual model that explains the transition toward digital product-service systems (PSS) in manufacturing SMEs through the combined lens of absorptive capacity theory and service-dominant logic. Drawing on a scoping review of the literature on servitization, absorptive capacity, and value co-creation, the study develops the Absorptive Capacity Model for Digital Servitization (ACM-DS), which crosses the four absorptive capacity dimensions—acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation—with three value co-creation actors: the supplier, the customer, and the wider network or ecosystem. Five theoretical propositions are derived from the model to guide future empirical research. The discussion addresses the specific barriers that manufacturing SMEs in developing regions encounter when attempting to reconfigure their business models around services rather than products, including data ownership concerns, revenue model uncertainty, and limited prior related knowledge. The model contributes a theory-grounded alternative to purely technology-centered accounts of digital transformation in manufacturing SMEs.