Smart products have received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners alike. One limitation of the existing literature, however, is that the term is often used as a blanket term and that there is no consensus on what a smart product actually is. Because different studies rely on differing conceptualizations, the current body of knowledge is scattered and lacks a uniform language and conceptual boundaries. Specifically, existing research has subsumed inherently different products under one collective term, has relied on a multitude of ad hoc criteria to define smart products or has conflated smart products with the services they render and/or the wider ecosystem, in which they operate. These developments limit the systematic advancement of the field and impede the integration of the smart product concept into related concepts such as the Internet of Things. To address these issues, this article provides an extensive analysis of the status quo of the field, with the goal of developing a common language and comprehensive conceptualization of smart products. First, existing studies on smart products were systematically reviewed across contributing disciplines and supplemented with a bibliometric analysis that allowed for a deeper understanding of the smart product concept within and across disciplines. This analysis revealed an initial set of 16 capability‐based criteria that are currently applied to conceptualize smart products. Second, based on a systematic coding procedure, these criteria were synthesized and organized within a comprehensive framework delineating four distinct product archetypes for the digital age: (1) Digital, (2) Connected, (3) Responsive, and (4) Intelligent. Third, three major conceptual themes that arise from this framework are identified and possibilities for future research are pointed out. In sum, this work contributes to the literature by improving the understanding of smart products as an epistemic object and by laying the ground for more cumulative research endeavors.

中文翻译：

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智能产品：概念回顾，综合和研究方向

智能产品越来越受到研究人员和从业人员的关注。然而，现有文献的局限性在于该术语经常被用作笼统术语，并且关于智能产品实际上是什么尚无共识。由于不同的研究依赖于不同的概念，因此当前的知识体系是分散的，缺乏统一的语言和概念边界。具体而言，现有研究将一个产品固有的不同产品归为一个集体术语，依靠多种临时标准来定义智能产品，或者将智能产品与其提供的服务和/或它们所运营的更广泛的生态系统相结合。这些发展限制了该领域的系统发展，并阻碍了将智能产品概念集成到相关概念（如物联网）中。为了解决这些问题，本文提供了对该领域现状的广泛分析，其目的是开发一种通用语言和智能产品的全面概念化。首先，对跨学科领域的智能产品现有研究进行系统地审查，并辅以文献计量分析，以使人们对跨学科的智能产品概念有更深入的了解。该分析揭示了最初的16条基于功能的标准，这些标准目前用于智能产品的概念化。其次，基于系统的编码程序，数字（2）已连接，（3）自适应和（4）智能。第三，确定了从该框架中产生的三个主要概念主题，并指出了未来研究的可能性。总而言之，这项工作通过增进对智能产品作为认知对象的理解，并为进行更多的累积研究工作奠定基础，为文献做出了贡献。