| Summary: | Manufacturers in developed countries today regard services as increasingly important. Some manufacturing firms are strategically shifting from a “product seller” towards a “service provider”. As a result, their offerings have come to form a combination of physical products and services. Along with this trend, concepts such as Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS²) are found in not only theoretical but also practical fields in industries. An IPS² is defined as “an integrated industrial product and service offering that delivers value in use”. This integrated offering and its way of development provides opportunities for companies and their customers to design more innovative solutions. IPS² has potential for better environmental performance, as well. On the other hand, this has a great impact on such companies. Delivering IPS² is not an easy task, and may force companies to change organizational structures and their mindsets. The CIRP IPS² Conference is organized by the CIRP IPS² Working Group. This 2nd CIRP IPS² Conference has 69 technical papers in the proceedings from 14 countries. This shows the interests of the topic within CIRP and the outside research community at large. The conference has 12 technical sessions, 2 keynote speeches and 2 industry study visits. Over 100 participants are expected to attend the conference. This IPS² conference will focus on research and practice into marketing, design, development, manufacturing, delivery, use, maintenance, and end-of-life of IPS². The topics to be addressed include manufacturing methods, development methods, service quality, information communication technologies, service networks, business models, and environmental performance. Reflecting the high degree of participants’ sharing backgrounds and disciplines, we will make a challenge on the way of organizing sessions in this conference. Unlike the tradition of CIRP conferences, presentations will be short with 10 minutes while long discussion across different presentations will be facilitated by session chairpersons with some 30 minutes after all the presentations in each session. We understand this has pros and cons, but in this particular case we believe this is, at least, a good attempt and hope this to produce more fruitful results. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors for their high-quality research papers, skilled session chairpersons, companies offering industry visits, the international scientific committee members for their support in reviewing the papers and the local organising committee for their efforts in preparing this conference. We would also like to thank our sponsors; VINNOVA (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), our gold sponsor Linköping municipality and our silver sponsors Servicestaden AB, Polyplank AB, SIG PM, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University and The Faste Laboratory at Luleå University of Technology for their support for the conference. Conference chairpersons, Tomohiko Sakao (Linköping University) Tobias Larsson (Luleå University of Technology)
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