Intellectual and territorial capital for the sustainability assessment of a servitization project

This communication is based on an industrial case study on the partial transition from selling products to Product-Service Systems (PSS). The importance of Intellectual capital (i.e. human, structural and relational capital) has already been underlined in PSS literature and some studies propose to adapt existing strategic management tools (e.g. balanced scorecard) to support PSS implementation. In addition, the importance of multiple forms of proximities in PSS projects has been highlighted: geographical proximity (e.g. logistic or maintenance issues), organizational and cognitive proximity (e.g. collaboration and shared objectives between partners and customers). Moreover, a project is the result of specific institutional, territorial and human arrangements. None of the existing framework for PSS projects analysis considers proximities or the institutional or territorial dimensions. A framework for territorial PSS assessment has been designed, based on literature on PSS and territorial projects and the specific needs and questions of the SHE company, its partners and some stakeholders (e.g. local governments, customers). Each selected dimension (e.g. customer, environment, human, etc.) was linked to specific assets in the value creation system (e.g. B-to-B-to-C customer capital) and then evaluated during the project to understand the evolutions of critical assets, their relative importance in this specific project and formulate recommendation to improve the proposition.