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The aim of the paper is analysis the linkages between the types of services (product-centric and knowledge-centric services) that manufacturers deliver to their customers and their (manufacturers) network capabilities configurations. The present study intends to contribute to the logistics and servitisation literature by drawing from the resource-based view and configuration theory to investigate which components of network capabilities are most important to enable manufacturers to develop and deliver services. Manufacturers are moving from selling products to providing solutions, offering innovative combinations of products and services. In the literature, this phenomena has been referred to as “servitisation”. Literature begin to highlight importance of different capabilities for product–service provision such as operational capabilities, digitalization capabilities, dynamic capabilities, network management capability and service innovation capability. The present study concentrates on network capabilities because of their strategic importance. Buyer-supplier relationships are critical for successfully providing services. Nonetheless, buyer–supplier relationships in servitised contexts have received little research attention until recently. Furthermore, many researchers study the abovementioned capabilities and their sub-components in isolation from one another. To explore the causal relationships a DEMATEL technique is adopted. Using sample data from nine Polish manufacturers (buyers and suppliers), this study contributes to the literature of servitisation in several ways. First, it must be concluded that not all industrial services require the same configurations of network capabilities. Second, when moving from product-centric to knowledge-centric services, the establishment of relationship-specific adaptations and cooperative norms increases.
Keywords: Network capability, servitisation, DEMATEL method, resource-based view, dynamic-based view© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.