The PSYMBIOSYS concept is based on a holistic and unifying collaboration concept (the symbiosis) implemented through a five-pointed star symbolizing the following 5 main dichotomies we have identified in product-service design. The symbiosis is a new collaboration form in the value chain which aims at establishing win-win relationships among all the stakeholders involved.

 

Symbiosis can be applied to the five main tussles below regarding product-service systems:

 

• A symbiotic design-manufacturing collaboration concept, to govern the complex interactions in a value chain between product design, service design and product-service manufacturing processes. This new concept is not founded on a forced top-down integration and uniform cross-organisational processes, competencies and IT tools, but, by preserving the peculiarities and specificity of each process (product service manufacturing) and stakeholder, aims at establishing and facilitating common but flexible meeting points for symbiotic knowledge sharing, collaborative what-if simulation and web-based synchronous decision making

 

• A symbiotic product-service lifecycle concurrency model, where state of the art PLM and SLM models applicable to several different industrial domains are deeply analyzed in order to find the most suitable interoperability means. In particular, product and service design process models are interconnected and channelled towards new product-service solutions manufacturing; product and service engineering organizational and competencies models are interconnected towards the formation of balanced teams for product-service innovation; product and service development IT models are made interoperable through the use of open standards and open semantic interoperability platforms.

 

• A symbiotic knowledge-sentiment sharing mechanism, where professional cross-organisational knowledge sharing mechanisms enabled by innovative IPR sharing and open ownership models are merged together with user-driven participative crowd-sourcing LivingLabs, enabled by powerful and flexible manufacturing intelligence methods and tools. The borders between manufacturing enterprise and society, and more in particular between engineers and consumers, are then blurring, favouring the birth of liquid enterprises, symbiotically integrated in their surrounding social and economic environment (manufacturing districts and regional clusters)

 

• A symbiotic SOA-EDA IT infrastructure able on the one side to sense the real world events (Event Driven Architecture) and on the other side to activate the needed enterprise services to react in real time to such events. By means of this symbiosis, messaging and notification mechanisms, characteristic of any EDA architecture, are influencing key and vital business processes and enterprise applications. The Real World in this case is able to participate in the Digital and Human decisional centers of an enterprise, also thanks to advanced instruments for simulation, optimization as well as innovative web based rendering and collaborative semantic annotation of 3D artefacts

 

• A symbiotic business-innovation strategy for sustainable product-service solutions provision, where traditional and formal Osterwalder-based business and industrial model canvas for economic competitiveness and time-to-market reduction and complemented by STEEP inspired sustainable quantitative performance indicators for CO2 footprint reduction, are symbiotically coupled with open to all user-driven innovation marathons and inducement prices where ideas generation and management methods, newly applied to product-service symbiotic solutions, aim to nurture and develop service innovation in the whole value chain. This symbiotic business modelling environment aims therefore at channelling human inventions and open innovation outcomes towards environment-, energy-, resource- aware economic and industrial product-service models for simulation, optimization as well as innovative web based rendering and collaborative semantic annotation of 3D artefacts

 

• A symbiotic business-innovation strategy for sustainable product-service solutions provision, where traditional and formal Osterwalder-based business and industrial model canvas for economic competitiveness and time-to-market reduction and complemented by STEEP inspired sustainable quantitative performance indicators for CO2 footprint reduction, are symbiotically coupled with open to all user-driven innovation marathons and inducement prices where ideas generation and management methods, newly applied to product-service symbiotic solutions, aim to nurture and develop service innovation in the whole value chain. This symbiotic business modelling environment aims therefore at channelling human inventions and open innovation outcomes towards environment-, energy-, resource- aware economic and industrial product-service models.