Business-to-business sales perspectives for future service robotics

Developing business with constantly growing data, automatization and service robotics raise growing interest in business world as well as in the academia. Alongside the fast development of digital technologies as well as companies’ transition from traditional, product-centred business to service-centred business, the data-based solutions are becoming more and more complex, such as services related to multi-purpose service robots. In addition, they include different kinds of services and several actors in the value network. These complex data-based solutions are also complex to sell or buy and require new approaches to sales. The purpose of this paper is to develop a future-oriented framework for selling robot enabled services in business-to-business (b-to-b) value network.
We studied the business-to-business sales perspectives for future service robotics by employing a qualitative case study approach. The empirical data included 13 semi-structured interviews in seven robotics, software, and service companies and three common company workshops involving the companies during Autumn 2021. The case companies all operate in b-to-b markets. They were selected because they are actively developing and taking into use complex data-based solutions, such as services and solutions enabled by service robots.