From technology enablers to circular economy: Data-driven understanding of the overview of servitization and product–service systems in Industry 4.0

Product-based companies worldwide attempt to integrate services into their offerings, embarking on “servitization” as a key strategy. These days, the acceleration of technological innovation (i.e., Industry 4.0) has triggered an emerging IT-driven business paradigm called digital servitization or smart product-service system (PSS) that embeds Industry 4.0 technologies. As a result of these developments, related literature has expanded across different disciplines in recent years. However, understanding and describing literature is not easy considering its volume and variety. Establishing common ground for central concepts is essential for science. Thus, to clarify important topics and research issues on servitization and PSSs in Industry 4.0, we carry out a comprehensive literature review by performing text mining of 419 journal articles. A machine learning approach is applied to learn and identify the specific topics, and the suggested key references are manually reviewed to develop a state-of-the-art overview. A total of 10 key research topics are identified, and the enabler–engineering–goal framework is developed. This study contributes to clarifying a systematized view of dispersed studies of servitization and PSSs in Industry 4.0 across multiple disciplines and encourages further academic discussions and industrial transformation.