Smart services in B2B contexts: A taxonomy and archetypes

Smart services – data-enabled services built on connected physical products – are increasingly central to digital transformation, yet organizations still struggle to systematically design and scale them in business-to-business (B2B) settings. Prior classifications predominantly reflect B2C assumptions or underrepresent B2B’s multi-actor governance, risk/liability, and data sharing constraints. Drawing on literature and a corpus of 100 publicly described B2B smart service cases, we develop and iteratively evaluate a taxonomy that captures the B2B smart service design space. The resulting taxonomy comprises seven dimensions with 25 characteristics, spanning innovation type, smart service outcome, service provider, target user, analytic capabilities, acting features, and information provision. Building on the taxonomy, we identify five empirically grounded archetypes via hierarchical clustering and qualitative interpretation: (A) Enhanced operational productivity, (B) Retrofitting upgrade, (C) Strategic provider insights, (D) Integrated remote management, and (E) Intelligent autonomous operation. Together, the taxonomy and archetypes provide a shared language for cumulative research and offer practitioners a strategic tool to assess portfolios and plan capability-aligned evolution paths.