Organizing the Integration Demands Across PSS Life Cycles: Towards a Specific form of Improvisation for Creating Customer-specific Solutions

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore a distinct form of improvisation as a specific coping mechanism for organizing the integration demands across PSS life cycles. The line of argumentation is based on state-of-the art literature which calls for a new form of organizing in PSS and the recent theoretical discourse of organizational improvisation in organization research. It is argued that organizational improvisation addresses the high integration demands and fosters the capability of innovative ad hoc problem-solving in PSS. An empirical investigation is introduced in order to specify a distinct pattern of organizational improvisation for PSS as a context of highly integrated value creation. The empirical results reveal a specific form of improvisation which can be characterized as a pattern of rapid responses for solving ad hoc problems in a selective bricolage of internal and external knowledge. On this basis an improvisation-integration model is suggested which outlines that organizational improvisation, as specified in this paper, may contribute to the mutual integration of product and service in a customer-specific way.