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
#28 From Copiers to Services: Xerox’s Long Road to Services
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Description
For decades, Xerox was synonymous with copiers and printers. But faced with digital disruption and declining print volumes, Xerox embarked on a long and often turbulent journey to reinvent itself as a services-led company. In this episode, we trace Xerox’s transformation from the mid-2000s to today.
We examine the bold pivot into business process outsourcing through the landmark acquisition of ACS, the rapid rise of services to more than half of total revenue, and the hard lessons that followed—culminating in the 2017 spin-off of Conduent. We then explore Xerox’s post-split refocus: cost transformation under Project Own It, the expansion of managed print and IT services, digital workflow platforms, augmented-reality support with CareAR, and the reinvention of Xerox Financial Services.
The episode highlights why servitization at scale is rarely linear. Xerox’s story shows both the power and the limits of services as a growth strategy—and why focus, execution, and alignment with core capabilities ultimately matter more than size. It’s a candid case of servitization as reinvention, correction, and renewal.
Key words
Xerox, Digital Servitization, Service Transformation, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Managed Print Services, IT Services, Recurring Revenue, Organizational Transformation, Corporate Reinvention