Limited evidence for servitisation in UK publishing: an empirical analysis

Servitisation is a strategic transition of firms towards the creation of additional value through services. In this study, we adopt a data-driven approach and assume that company activity descriptions are representative of their activity and partly reflect the adopted strategy. We hypothesise that if there is a trend of traditional publishing firms adopting servitisation strategies, this should emerge from textual analysis of company descriptors. Relying on data-driven analysis of publicly available company information for UK and Ireland, we find no significant evidence of strategic diversity as a single group emerges from diverse clustering methods. Our results show either that the publicly available dataset is not representative of firm strategy in the publishing industry or that there is no real evidence of servitisation in the publishing sector. Implications for theory and for industry are discussed.