.png)
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
#15 Navigating Disruption: How TomTom Transformed from Hardware Devices to Data Services
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Description:
In this episode, we dive into the remarkable journey of TomTom—from dominating Europe’s consumer GPS market to becoming a global leader in location technology services. Facing the collapse of the portable navigation device (PND) market amid smartphone disruption and tech giants like Google, TomTom executed one of the most ambitious digital servitization pivots in the tech industry. We explore how the company shifted from a B2C hardware model to a B2B software and data platform through strategic acquisitions, service innovation, partnerships with Apple, Microsoft, and automakers, and the development of its groundbreaking TomTom Maps Platform. This case illustrates what it really takes for a traditional product company to reinvent itself as a digital services player.
Keywords:
TomTom, digital servitization, platform transformation, B2B strategy, location technology, PND, GPS, automotive software, smart mobility, mapping services, Google Maps, Apple Maps, corporate reinvention, digital maps, platform economy, business transformation, disruptive innovation, software-as-a-service (SaaS), open data, autonomous vehicles.