Strategic 5Ps and their IT based service business model for corporate sustainability

This paper proposes a sustainable service-oriented business model focusing on social capital. In a highly servitized economy, companies need to transform their businesses to more service-centric ones and create social capital with customers to sustain their businesses. We focus on two businesses (a perception support service and a food and beverage service) that make relationships with customers closer through service value co-creation. As a result of longitudinal case studies about their service business strategies, we found the following five strategic elements for corporate sustainability: (i) Product: the physical elements that provide functional values to customers; (ii) Place: the environmental elements, such as shops, buildings, and equipment, that facilitate contact points with customers; (iii) People: the human elements that improve value-in-use by co-creation with customers; (iv) Perspective: the worldview that organically integrates corporate internal and external resources; and (v) Program: the service processes that build and promote social capital between customers and employees. This paper proposes the sustainable service-oriented business model based on IT that combines the five elements effectively and also considers compatibility with manufacturing companies.