Innovative design method for a valuable product-service system: Concretizing multi-stakeholder requirements

As one of the differentiation strategies towards the strained global competitive market, the concept of Product-Service System (PSS) is emerging. Product-Service System (PSS) is a concept of service system, which is represented with functional deliveries from a provider to a receiver in which products and/or services are the devices for transmitting the functions. In general, actual PSSs in business are forming a complicated consortium in which various multi-stakeholders are involved. The success of product/service design relies in great measure upon the accurate understanding and satisfying of multi-stakeholder requirements, but none of the available PSS design methodologies touch upon how to incorporate and realize the multi-stakeholder requirements in PSS design. This paper intends to fill in this research gap by proposing a practical method to capture and analyze the dependency of multi-stakeholder requirements to enable the development of valuable PSS design which satisfies these requirements. The rationality of PSS design is measured using Life Cycle Costing (LCC) in order to ensure the realization of multi-stakeholder requirements persist to lay within the company’s capabilities. The proposed method was found effective in a case study application to concretize multi-stakeholder requirements in design embodiment of PSS offering. The complex requirements from multiple stakeholders were structured and reflected in the PSS design structure.