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  • Spring and Araujo 2016 Product biographies IMM post print

    Rights statement: This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Industrial Marketing Management. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Industrial Marketing Management, 60, 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.indmarman.2016.07.001

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    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Product biographies in servitization and the circular economy

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>01/2017
<mark>Journal</mark>Industrial Marketing Management
Volume60
Number of pages12
Pages (from-to)126-137
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date7/07/16
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This paper questions the assumption in much of the marketing and product-service literature that products can be treated as stable platforms for the delivery of services. Instead, it uses the notion of the product biography to argue that products are chronically unstable, both physically and institutionally, and focusses on the managerial and institutional effort required to temporarily stabilise and qualify products for exchange or service value-creation. The context of the circular economy, which presents particularly acute challenges of qualification, is used to stimulate insights into how the product biography approach can inform the servitization debate. In particular, the circular economy perspective emphasises the need to see products as qualified by and constitutive of a distributed network, rather than defined once and for all by their producer, and points to entrepreneurial opportunity in the moments of transition between singularised, unique specimens and general, commodified, manageable objects – and vice versa. The wider and multiple product biographies occasioned by the circular economy also lead to reconfiguration of networks, as new potential valuations give rise to new entrepreneurial spaces.

Bibliographic note

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Industrial Marketing Management. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Industrial Marketing Management, 60, 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.indmarman.2016.07.001