XXII ASAP FORUM – Day 2: Digital Services at a Crossroad: Progress or Stagnation?

The second day of the XXII ASAP Forum deepened the strategic understanding of servitisation by moving beyond tools and solutions to address mindsets, coalitions, regulation, and risk. Across four complementary sessions, Day 2 highlighted that servitisation maturity is less about isolated technologies or single business models and more about long-term strategic coherence, collaboration across ecosystems, and organisational readiness to manage uncertainty. The opening keynote by Professor Heiko Gebauer reframed 25 years of servitisation research by challenging five widely held myths. His contribution stressed that servitisation should not be reduced to increasing service revenue shares, internal capability building, service portfolio expansion, or digital add-ons. Instead, empirical evidence shows that successful servitisation unfolds over long time horizons, often through M&A strategies, prioritises service sophistication over mere extension, and is tightly interwoven with product innovation. Digitalisation and servitisation emerged as mutually reinforcing dynamics rather than a linear cause–and–effect relationship. The second session on “Building coalitions for Mobility-as-a-Service” demonstrated that advanced service models require institutional, organisational, and behavioural coalitions. Contributions from the Regione Piemonte, Jojob, and the Università del Piemonte Orientale showed that technological platforms alone are insufficient. Governance complexity, cultural resistance, fragmented responsibilities, and user habits represent the real bottlenecks. MaaS was framed as a socio-technical transformation in which incentives act as catalysts, not solutions, and in which wellbeing, trust, and coordination are as critical as apps and data. The third session focused on “Building coalitions: digital connected services to industrial assets”, combining academic framing with the GreenBox project. Research insights clarified how digital servitisation depends on managing vertical, lateral, and horizontal collaborations, supported by both structural mechanisms (roles, data governance, IPR, platforms) and relational mechanisms (trust, reciprocity, shared commitment). The GreenBox case illustrated how value emerges when OEMs retain ownership of domain knowledge while delegating software complexity to specialised partners. The case showed that digital servitisation succeeds when data are translated into actionable services, not when technology is pursued for its own sake. The final session, “Lights and shadows of servitisation”, offered a pragmatic reflection on success factors and failure modes, drawing on the experiences of Prima Power, Tetra Pak, Electrolux Professional, and Syncron. While digital tools enable predictive maintenance, TCO optimisation, and advanced contracts, the session made clear that pricing risk, customer maturity, regulatory incentives, and long asset lifecycles can undermine “as-a-service” ambitions. Continuous profitability monitoring, data-driven cost prediction, and alignment between service strategy and customer reality emerged as non-negotiable conditions. Overall, Day 2 reinforced a central message: servitisation is a systemic transformation. It requires long-term vision, coalition building across organisational and sectoral boundaries, robust data infrastructures, and leadership capable of navigating both the opportunities and the inherent tensions of shifting risk, responsibility, and value creation from products to outcomes.