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The Digital Servitization Exchange Podcast
Connecting research and practice in the transformation from products to digital services.
The Digital Servitization Exchange Podast explores how manufacturers create and capture value through services and software. Designed for both researchers and practitioners, the podcast brings together academic insight and industry experience to unpack the concepts, challenges, and opportunities driving digital servitization.
Each episode delves into themes such as service innovations, subscription models, industrial IoT, digital platform ecosystems, and organizational transformation. Rather than focusing on individual voices, the podcast emphasizes relevant topics that matter across domains — offering evidence-based perspectives for academics and actionable ideas for business professionals.
By bridging theory and practice, The Digital Servitization Exchange Podcast provides a space where learning flows both ways: from research to real-world implementation, and from practice back to research.
Ideal for: academics, doctoral researchers, industrial leaders, digital transformation managers, service strategists, and anyone shaping the future of digitally enabled services.
The Digital Servitization Exchange Podcast
#08 When Washing Became a Service: Lessons from Electrolux’s Pay-Per-Wash Experiment
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Description
In this episode, we unpack Electrolux’s pioneering—and often overlooked—pay-per-wash pilot, launched in Sweden more than 20 years before “as-a-service” models went mainstream. Electrolux tested a radical idea: households would no longer buy washing machines, but pay only for the function—each wash cycle. We explore why the model emerged, how it worked technically and commercially, why adoption was modest, and what valuable lessons it revealed about customer behavior, sustainability, and cultural readiness for service-based consumption.
This story offers a rare glimpse into an innovation that was ahead of its time—and what it tells us about the future of product-service systems.
Key Words: Servitization, Circular Economy, Functional Sales, Consumer Behavior
Sustainability, Business Model Innovation