With the profound transformation of service-oriented manufacturing worldwide since the 21st century, a new industrial model based on the combination of products and services has become a new profit and value growth point for manufacturing enterprises. Enterprises are shifting from simple product production to providing a comprehensive product-service system, further evolving into a smart product-service system, and ultimately expanding into Sustainable Intelligent Interconnected Ecosystems (SICE). The complexity and dynamic nature of SICE make its business and value boundaries unclear, and there is no effective theoretical framework and method for boundary identification and value capture, which hinders the sustainable development of SICE. To clarify the effective boundaries of the operation of the SICE, an innovative model and methods of the framework process, system boundaries for the SICE have been proposed. This study constructs a systematic framework for SICE business and value boundary research to optimize business boundary integration, and verifies the model through empirical research in the smart-home industry, providing a new method for SICE boundary identification and value capture. The system boundary research methods proposed in this paper can identify the business boundary and value boundary of the smart-home product-service ecosystem through a hierarchical approach, and the case illustration shows that the methods have certain applicability and practical guiding significance for the construction of smart-home product-service enterprise business platforms.
Xie et al. (Mon,) studied this question.