Today, in a product-service offering, the product and its related services can represent two main sources of revenue streams for the manufacturer. Tomorrow, information deriving from servitization and exploited on an ecosystem level, could represent the third one, whereas due to their ample potential in sharp market value increase, they could even become the manufacturer's main revenue stream. This article of explorative nature questions the possibility to introduce such disruptive approach. In order to do so, servitization is evinced through a new perspective, through information. In order to exploit this new potential, the concept of an information ecosystem is introduced. Secondly, a new role is proposed, helping manufacturers to span the boundary between product and service. To depict the impact of the introduced concepts while positioning it in relevant literature, a third layer of added value was added to Thoben's representation of servitization levels [1], the information layer.

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Abstract. The trend for servitization is increasingly affecting manufacturing enterprises. Products are bundled with associated services to so called "Extended Products" (EP). However, the share of services becomes more and more important. This requires on the one hand an evolution of the EP concept towards greater interoperability of the physical product and on the other hand additional competencies in service innovation. Traditional manufacturing enterprises are not able to handle the related challenges by themselves. The paper presents a more open and service-oriented "EP 2.0" concept and introduces the Manufacturing Service Ecosystem as a model to support service innovation by facilitating collaboration.

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The advantages of distributed development teams help companies to address megatrends like globalization and individualization. However, development teams are facing challenges according to increasing requirements on communication processes. This approach provides a methodology to identify and address improvement potentials in communication processes of distributed product development by including the dimensions technology, organization and human involved in the development process. The validation of the methodology's process steps was carried out together with a machine tool manufacturer.