Barriers to Digital Servitization in French Manufacturing SMEs

The importance of digitalization is widely recognized, but digital transformation is not commonplace, and companies often struggle to face the challenges it entails. Digitalization and digital transformation are even more challenging for manufacturing SMEs. In this paper, we aim at investigating the barriers to digital servitization faced by manufacturing SMEs. We build on a literature review on barriers and obstacles to digital servitization, and present a set of case studies that enable us to identify the main barriers these French manufacturing SMEs face in their move toward digital servitization. Our findings show that digital servitization is at a very early stage in these SMEs, and that the main barriers they face are both organizational and customer-related.