It is all about services-fundamentals, drivers, and business models

Service economy, service science, service-dominant logic and servitization are apparently related terms. All of them emerged and are located in different disciplines, which do not ease things at all. Accordingly, this paper provides on the one side a fundamental theoretical background on these topics, and on the other side facilitates subsequent research by providing some reference points. At the beginning, the topic of service economy and its increasing share on total employment are elaborated to show its current importance. Consequently, the notion and definition of the term service is conducted, which is followed by the discussion about goods, their differences to service and the drivers for the transition to a service-dominant economy. Furthermore, the concept of business models and its' varying characteristics are reviewed, since they play a major role in service economy. And, the last section leads finally over to the intrinsic topic such as research approaches on the Services.