Smart products have received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners alike. One limitation of the existing literature, however, is that the term is often used as a blanket term and that there is no consensus on what a smart product actually is. Because different studies rely on differing conceptualizations, the current body of knowledge is scattered and lacks a uniform language and conceptual boundaries. Specifically, existing research has subsumed inherently different products under one collective term, has relied on a multitude of ad hoc criteria to define smart products or has conflated smart products with the services they render and/or the wider ecosystem, in which they operate. These developments limit the systematic advancement of the field and impede the integration of the smart product concept into related concepts such as the Internet of Things. To address these issues, this article provides an extensive analysis of the status quo of the field, with the goal of developing a common language and comprehensive conceptualization of smart products. First, existing studies on smart products were systematically reviewed across contributing disciplines and supplemented with a bibliometric analysis that allowed for a deeper understanding of the smart product concept within and across disciplines. This analysis revealed an initial set of 16 capability-based criteria that are currently applied to conceptualize smart products. Second, based on a systematic coding procedure, these criteria were synthesized and organized within a comprehensive framework delineating four distinct product archetypes for the digital age: (1) Digital, (2) Connected, (3) Responsive, and (4) Intelligent. Third, three major conceptual themes that arise from this framework are identified and possibilities for future research are pointed out. In sum, this work contributes to the literature by improving the understanding of smart products as an epistemic object and by laying the ground for more cumulative research endeavors. Practitioner Points • The analysis can be used to navigate in the areas of smart products and IoT as well as to leverage a firm's internal understanding of what smart products are and how smart products can be conceptualized as distinct archetypes. • The proposed framework can help to understand how physical and virtual components of a product have to be orchestrated to perform certain functions and services and which requirements need to be fulfilled to lift a product to a more advanced level. • Practitioners may use the framework to decompose value creation at the level of components and functions in order to develop an optimal architecture of a smart product's hardware and software as well as to derive effective pricing models.
Despite their increasing relevance, research falls short to reveal the key factors hindering the adoption of smart technologies. Therefore, the aim of this exploratory study was to elicit consumers' cognitive representations, i.e. mental models of different smart product concepts based on similarity and dissimilarity judgments, and to label the key dimensions based on which consumers mentally categorize them. This was expected to shed light on drivers of adoption resistance in order to help practitioners in product design and promotion. An innovative mix of two research methods was applied, namely quantitative-descriptive projective mapping and free associations. We found that consumers mentally balance released smart product concepts along with a rationally laden 'useful-useless' dimension and unreleased concepts along with an emotionally laden 'intrusive-useful' dimension. Additionally, this research showcases (1) method diversity in the field of IS and (2) how non-IS scholars who apply new approaches to an IS phenomenon contribute with new perspectives and thus enrich the field as a whole. This is work in progress and part of an overarching mixed-method agenda. The exploratory findings will be used to carve out further research directions for this growing field (e.g. the development of a construct measuring consumers' perceived intrusion of smart products).
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