Servitization for Teaching and Research Laboratories

Abstract

In this paper, we present a pattern for assessing the feasibility of laboratories and lab networks to operate in a service-oriented form of business. Our focus is on the field of engineering, and on a network of academic labs, and we aim to provide a practical tool for disclosing the opportunity of servitization, or to use Laboratories-as-a-Service (LaaS), for interested companies. By using a traditional pitch deck approach, we define the available digital online offer of the specific labs, and we structure a questionnaire to investigate the market demand. Afterwards, we sketch the main servitization characteristics required to digital online labs from a business perspective.
 The pattern we propose has been used as a guideline for interviews to selected stakeholders of two specific labs, namely a remotely available RFID lab for internal logistics in the retail sector, and a serious game for operations and supply chain management. The answers we collected suggested the feasibility of the labs servitization, by defining both strengths and weaknesses.

Guest editorial: Opportunities and threats in providing remote access to manufacturing-related environments

“…From a manufacturing point of view, there are several concepts that can be linked to remote-access to physical systems: as an example, the concept of cloud manufacturing has emerged in the last decade, which refers to on-demand access to a shared collection of distributed manufacturing resources through the integration of new generation ICTs with advanced manufacturing methods, such as networked and virtual manufacturing systems (Thames and Schaefer, 2016). Other important research streams involve reconfigurable and flexible manufacturing systems, as well as the concept of servitization, that is the integrated offering of product and services, with a clear emphasis on the latter one (Baines and Lightfoot, 2014; Reverberi et al ., 2022). Servitization, also linked to the various “as-a-service” approaches, appears to be both a pivotal element in modern economies, and a growing and competitive strategy for manufacturing companies.…”