Could ownership soon be a thing of the past?

Question: If sustainability requires consumers to reduce consumption, how can a company that makes money selling products address this concern while maintaining profits? The answer, according to a handful of analysts and companies, is “servicizing.”

The idea of “servicizing” — shifting a company’s business model and mind-set away from selling products toward selling a mix of products and the services those products provide consumers in order to reduce the number of products sold without reducing profits — has been around for decades. The model gained currency in business-to-business applications during the 1990s, when companies including Xerox (NYSE: XRX) and Interface Carpets (Nasdaq: IFSIA) modernized the office by providing “document services” and “carpet services” as opposed to the products themselves.

These companies realized business customers didn’t need printers and faxes and carpet. They needed to be able to print materials and share information. They needed attractive, clean flooring to work on. From this realization, the servicizing model was born.

In more recent times, technology has created more opportunities for similar innovations. Companies now lease computers from IBM (NYSE: IBM), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) and Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ), and can upgrade machines easily — without large up-front costs — as new technology becomes available. And companies interested in solar power can now avoid the costs and risks involved in building a solar energy plant by opting for renewable energy services instead.

Rita Gunther McGrath, associate professor at the Columbia Business School and co-author of “The Entrepreneurial Mindset and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth” calls it “finding a new unit of business” and says it’s something a lot of companies are looking to do.

“The most successful companies capture the absolute greatest amount of customer spending, or create far lower costs for themselves by altering what they sell,” she says.