The last six months have confirmed a shift we’ve been anticipating for years: Product-as-a-Service is no longer a fringe experiment. It’s becoming a core strategy when it’s done right.
At Black Winch, we’ve spent this half of the year engaging with the companies willing to challenge legacy systems, redesign their operational backbones, and put value, not volume, at the center of their business models.
Two key moments stood out. Not just for what was shared, but for what they revealed about what it takes to scale.
1. Executive Dinner in Munich: Making Monetization Work in Industrial PaaS
Co-hosted with Zuora | March 26, 2025
In March, we co-hosted an executive dinner with Zuora to tackle the next frontier: how to build monetization models that truly support scalable, circular businesses.
The room was filled with leaders from industrial equipment, SaaS, and AI; each navigating the same question: How do you grow recurring revenue without defaulting to generic subscriptions?
Key insights shared:
- Hybrid pricing is winning. Usage and commitment-based models are outpacing flat-rate subscriptions across industries, driving higher growth and retention.
- GenAI is accelerating pricing innovation. As AI use cases explode, user-based pricing breaks down. Companies are experimenting with outcome-based charges, per successful resolution, per AI task completed, per patient acuity level.
- More metrics = more growth. The highest performers are those who anchor revenue to multiple well-chosen value drivers. Pricing isn't about simplicity. It's about relevance.
- SaaS and EaaS are converging. Industrial players are building offers that include hardware, software, maintenance, and consulting under one contract, one price logic, and one customer journey.
- PaaS beats leasing on all fronts. From customer lifetime value to circularity, the performance gap is becoming impossible to ignore.
2. The Risks That Paid Off: Unconventional PaaS, Done Right
Hosted by Yann Toutant, CEO at Black Winch | May 7, 2025
Exclusive guests:
- Jonas Kjellberg, Founder of NORNORM - LinkedIn
- Yann Carré, Head of circular business models B2B at Decathlon - LinkedIn
- Dominiek Plancke, CEO at ETAP Lighting - LinkedIn
- Jaco van Zijll Langhout, Partner at BearingPoint - LinkedIn
Our latest webinar brought together bold perspectives from leaders who did not “add a subscription model”, they re-engineered their entire value creation logic.
Here’s what emerged:
- Circularity is not an add-on. For companies transitioning to PaaS, circularity isn’t the sustainability chapter at the end. It’s the starting point. Whether through refurbishment of lighting infrastructure or shifting sports retail to access-based models, circular design and retained ownership are becoming the backbone of viable offers.
- PaaS is not a pricing exercise. Scaling as-a-service demands rewiring operations, IT, sales incentives, customer journeys, and risk models. One speaker put it best: “You can’t be half pregnant.” Either you're transforming or you're not.
- The internal journey is as tough as the external one. Organizational buy-in, especially in large legacy companies, remains one of the biggest hurdles. Leaders are finding success by building MVPs, measuring CO₂ per euro of margin, and anchoring decisions in long-term purpose.
- Reverse logistics and asset management are where strategy meets reality. Many underestimated just how much redesign is needed to enable product returns, repairs, and reuse at scale. But that’s where competitive advantage is built and where circularity becomes tangible.
- Funding is still a bottleneck but it’s solvable. Whether via infrastructure funds, vendor partnerships, or internal banking arms, companies are finding creative ways to avoid piling assets on the balance sheet while retaining control over performance contracts.
Replay available here.
What Comes Next
What we’ve seen in both events is clear: Product-as-a-Service isn’t disruptive because it’s trendy. It’s disruptive because it forces companies to redesign how they deliver value operationally, financially, and environmentally.
At Black Winch, our job is to make that redesign actionable. To turn vision into implementation. To equip intrapreneurs with the tools, the structure, and the community to make the leap.
Because bold ideas are only the beginning. The real transformation is what follows.
Let's talk.
