LAUSR

The relevance of service economy is well acknowledged if considering the share of the service sector in the world economy which has grown steadily from the ‘50 in a trend that is continuing (Schwab 2016). Such trend is furthermore pushed by the advent of digital technologies and, wider, by the fourth industrial revolution (Frank et al. 2019). Within this process, the phenomenon of servitization in manufacturing firms has been recognized as the trend to “the increased offering of fuller market packages or ‘bundles’ of customer focussed combinations of goods, services, support, selfservice and knowledge in order to add value to core corporate offerings” (Vandermerwe and Rada 1988). It represents a business model innovation where the relationships between products and services change in the logic of value creation (Baines et al. 2009; Lay 2014). The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the relevance of service business models underlying their potential for improving resilience and driving innovation, fostering an increasing number of firms to undertake processes of digital servitization (Rapaccini et al. 2020). There are several critical aspects to be taken into consideration to support the service business innovation of the manufacturers. First, new governance is supposed to be flexible enough to deal with different levels of service innovation across the customer industries in different regions. This furthermore requires new management accounting practices (for instance financial indicators) for the manufacturers. Second, regarding the financial aspects of the new service operations, the value is increasingly generated along the entire life-cycle of the products and their relations/connections to use contexts. Third, the management accounting needs to be re-thought to fit with the organizational changes, to manage the product fleets, to increase customer value and to enhance service operations. In this respect, the choice of a servitization strategy naturally affects the division of tasks between the manufacturers, the customers and third-party service providers. It challenges the