Towards the definition of a novel quality paradigm for Product-Service Systems

Product-Service Systems (PSS) are increasingly emerging as an important source of competitive advantage, allowing manufacturing companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. PSS are integrated bundles of products, services and supporting infrastructures, which are jointly capable of fulfilling specific client demands over the whole product life cycle. Despite the recognized importance of PSS issues and the extent of published research in this area, few studies have investigated the way PSS quality is perceived. Two basics research questions are analysed in this investigation: (i) What are the latent quality dimensions of PSS? (ii) Are the quality dimensions the same for different PSS? This investigation proposes an innovative approach to recognise PSS quality dimensions. The identification of PSS quality dimensions could be based on the extensive analysis of UGC leveraging tools and methodologies for big data mining. Big data analysis based on UGC may offer an effective way of investigating a large variety of PSS settings without incurring in expensive and time-consuming endeavours typical of the traditional empirical approach. The combination of evidence derived from the analysis of different typologies of PSS and the comparison of the results with currently dominant theoretical frameworks from the literature (e.g. product quality and service quality) may provide a new means to develop and empirically validate a generalizable and comprehensive set of quality dimensions for PSS.