Servitisation in European manufacturing industries: empirical evidence from a large-scale database

Manufacturing firms increasingly produce and provide services along with or instead of their traditional physical products. The goal of this paper is to provide new evidence for this servitisation of European manufacturing and test previous findings based on case studies with a large, firm-level data set. Empirical results indicate that service turnover of manufacturing firms is still small compared to the turnover with physical products. National differences play only a minor role in explaining the degree of servitisation. Firm size is of more relevance. Results reveal a U-shaped relationship between firm size and servitisation which points to advantages of both, small and large firms in servitisation. Moreover, servitisation is positively related to product complexity and the likelihood that the firm introduces product innovation.