Product-Service Systems (PSS) has now for more than a decade been a research interest in Europe and Japan. The research aims to support manufacturing industries’ ability to provide value in terms of a service offer to its customers, simultaneously taking a more holistic approach to eco-sustainability. The idea of providing customer benefits in parallel with robust products is not new, yet equipping engineers to integrate a radical innovation and service perspective in the early design stages is received as fairly radical. Prevailing methods, tools and design thinking are barriers that prevents approaching PSS by the necessary integration of several, but distinct, logics.Due to the inclusion of both product development and service development in development of PSS, at least, two schools of thoughts exist within the research field of PSS development. Namely, one based on product development rationality and one based on service provision reasoning. In general, such a situation would be a base for a conflict where the debate focuses, which strand that should be more valid than the other. However, if so, this would certainly not benefit the need for cross-disciplinarily research of PSS. The purpose in this paper is two-fold; first, to describe PSS research efforts by acknowledging both the product and the service perspective, second to explore and discuss future directions and by that identify “white spots” on the map which may be seen as relevant to bridge the integration gap.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the rising potential of social software to increase the knowledge management capabilities of virtual product development teams. It presents six fundamental transitions, elaborated from the empirical findings, which justify the rise of a more bottom-up, social creation and sharing of engineering knowledge in the virtual organisation. The study suggests that traditional engineering knowledge management approaches alone are not sufficient to support development activities in the virtual organisation, and that such teams display an increasing demand for social, comparatively lightweight and remixable platforms for bottom-up, social creation and sharing of knowledge.

The paper discusses the key enabling mechanisms introduced byWeb 2.0 technologies that can support Product Service Systems (PSSs)development teams in increasing the quality of early design decisions.The paper collects success stories and lessons learned from two empirical casestudies in the aeronautical supply chain, and from a set of questionnairesforwarded to major automotive manufacturers, about the implementation ofEngineering 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs and forums, to overcomeknowledge-sharing barriers between cross-functional design teams. The studyreveals that bottom-up and lightweight technologies can enable theimplementation of more value-driven development processes, providing meansfor locating expertise in the extended organisation, for capturing the ‘context’of the information managed, and for assessing and validating knowledge assetsin a more collaborative fashion. Eventually, it points to the most relevant issuesthat currently prevent the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies in a productdevelopment setting.

The extension of businesses to incorporate the provision of function as a service in supplement to standalone products is an ongoing movement in manufacturing industry. In short, this means that the development intent should be guided by the need of ‘performance in use’ that the customer wants, e.g. thrust rather than an engine. By this, the established knowledge base challenges the development team.This paper embarks from the assumption that there are three main challenges, i.e. (1) innovation activities, (2) customer data acquisition and (3) the transformation of data into design information. The purpose is to discuss knowledge sharing activities to contribute to product-service innovation. In this study it has been found that contemporary data acquisition activities filter out important dimensions of knowledge. Thus, does not provide a sound base for service provisions.

Streamlining new product development forces companies to make decisions on preliminary information. This paper considers this challenge within the context of project management in the aerospace sector, and in particular the development of product-service systems. The concept of knowledge maturity is explored as a means to provide practical decision support, which increases decision makers' awareness of the knowledge base and supports cross-boundary discussions on the perceived maturity of available knowledge, thereby identifying and mitigating limitations. Requirements are elicited from previous research on knowledge maturity in the aerospace industry and a knowledge maturity model is developed through five industry-based workshops.

In recent years there has been a growing interest among product development organizations to capitalize on engineering knowledge as their core competitive advantage for innovation. Capturing, storing, retrieval, sharing and reusing of engineering knowledge from a wide range of enterprise memory systems have become crucial activities of knowledge management practice in competitive organizations. In light of a changing and dynamic enterprise definition, including a move towards Product-Service System (PSS) development, this paper discusses some of the limitations of current enterprise systems in reusing engineering knowledge across functional and corporate boundaries. Further, the paper illustrates how Web 2.0-based collaborative technologies can leverage cross-functional knowledge for new PSS development projects through an open, bottom-up, and collective sense-making approach to knowledge management.

Under senare år har det funnits ett växande intresse bland organisationer som arbetar med produktutveckling att utnyttja sin tekniska kunskap som huvudsaklig konkurrensfördel för innovation. Fånga, lagra, hämta, dela och återanvändning av kunskap från en rad olika affärssystem har blivit avgörande aktiviteter när det gäller kunskapshantering. Mot bakgrund av en föränderlig och dynamiskt företag miljö, samt en övergång till Product-Service System (PSS) utveckling, diskuterar denna artikel några av begränsningarna för dagens affärssystem beträffande återanvändning av ingenjörskunnande över funktionella samt företagens gränser. Vidare visar artikeln på hur Web 2.0-baserade samarbetsprojekt kan utnyttja tvärfunktionellkunskap för nya PSS utvecklingsprojekt, genom ett öppet, “bottom-up”, och kollektivt “sense-making” förhållningssätt till kunskapshantering.

PROJEKTSAMMANFATTNINGPIEp, Product Innovation Engineering Program är ett nationellt program som syftar till att stärka förmågan till innovativ produkt- och affärsutveckling. PIEp spänner över fältet från teori till praktik, från forskning om innovationssystem till proaktivt arbete för att stärka innovationskraft och därigenom uppnå en systemförändring inom forskning, utbildning och utveckling. PIEp skall pågå under tio år, 2007-2016 och engagera flera av Sveriges lärosäten och forskningsinstitut involverade i innovation och produktutveckling. PIEp leds och administreras vid KTH i partnerskap med Lunds Tekniska Högskola, Högskolan i Jönköping, Designhögskolan vid Umeå Universitet, Centrum för Teknik, Medicin och Hälsa, Luleå Tekniska Universitet, samt en rad företag och organisationer.

This paper analyzes the knowledge sharing process that characterizes Product Service Systems (PSS) design, drawing on data from an in-depth study in the Swedish manufacturing industry. It categorizes and describes the most relevant knowledge sharing barriers affecting early PSS development phases, discussing them in terms of capabilities to be included in a knowledge engineering system to fulfil the increasing need for knowledge in product-service design. To cope with these barriers, the authors introduce the concept of Engineering 2.0, which borrows the general Web 2.0 concept and translates it into engineering terms, going into the details of how functional product development may benefit from the possibility to integrate bottom-up and "lightweight" knowledge sharing techniques with traditional PLM/PDM/CAD solutions, and highlighting the most relevant challenges for the Engineering 2.0 research.