Smart Product-Service Systems Solution Design via Hybrid Crowd Sensing Approach

The third wave of information technology (IT) competition has enabled one promising value co-creation proposition, Smart PSS (smart product-service systems). Manufacturing companies offer smart, connected products with various e-services as a solution bundle to meet individual customer satisfaction, and in return, collect and analyze usage data for evergreen design purposes in a circular manner. Despite a few works discussing such value co-creation business mechanism, scarcely any has been reported from technical aspect to realizing this data-driven manufacturer/service provider-customer interaction cost-effectively. To fill this gap, a novel hybrid crowd sensing approach is proposed, and adopted in the Smart PSS context. It leverages large-scale mobile devices and their massive user-generated/product-sensed data, and converges with reliable static sensing nodes and other data sources in the smart, connected environment for value generation. Both the proposed hybrid crowd sensing conceptual framework and its systematic information modeling process are introduced. An illustrative example of smart water dispenser maintenance service design is given to validate its feasibility. The result shows that the proposed approach can be a promising manner to enable value co-creation process cost-effectively.