Citation (IEEE): V. Shankar, L. L. Berry, and T. Dotzel, “A Practical Guide to Combining Products and Services,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 87, no. 11, pp. 77–83, Nov. 2009.
What it argues
Drawing on more than a hundred hybrid offerings, the authors classify product-and-service combinations by two traits: how much each part adds to the other’s value, and whether the parts can be used separately. That gives four kinds of bundle, each suited to different situations. They identify the common ways such offerings fail and give four rules for designing one: find real differentiation, make the service scalable, analyze where the revenue and profit actually lie, and invest in the brand that ties the two together.