Moving towards the Incomplete: A Research Agenda for the Development of Future Products in the Digital Economy

Pervasive digital technologies are advancing at an exponential rate, changing the nature of products and services as we know them. Firms could now serve context through the delivery of digitally enabled offerings. Serving context requires the product to be designed as incomplete, allowing the consumers to complete the offering in context through the application of their own resources. An offering may be digitised in such a way that functionality can be added (reprogrammed) even after the product has been transferred to the customer. In that respect, the product will remain “incomplete” through life 1. An incomplete product can be tailored to the customers’ context to obtain a better “fit” with its environment and what the customer wants to achieve. Value co-creation occurs in context; empowering the consumer with the ability to dynamically reconfigure the offering the benefit is potentially increased. Incomplete products skew the trade-off between standardisation and personalisation. In the case of the iPhone ®, the boundary of standardisation is drawn at the hardware level where as the boundary for personalisation is drawn at the digital app layer, allowing firms to derive scale economies whilst the customer is achieves high levels of personalisation. This paper proposes three areas need a completely need study. First, it explores product and service architectures and the role of modularity within incomplete products. Second, it aims to conceptualize a meaning for indefinite postponement, a new concept enabled by incomplete products and digital technologies. The final area for discussion is transaction boundaries. Roll Royce have shown through their Power by the Hour © that transaction boundaries can be redrawn so that the focus is on outcomes rather than exchange. The concept of incomplete product will have a significant impact on transaction boundaries in the digital economy. As the offering is reconfigured in context, understanding the human resource and how they integrate their own resource into the offering will be key. A number of challenges for service research are proposed that will have significant implications on the development of incomplete products in the connected digital economy.