Abstract Since the 1970s, marketing and innovation management communities have been investigating how to incorporate customer-desired functions into new product and service designs. These wide-ranging enquiries have shed light on the impact of lead-user engagement in new product development, demonstrated ways to examine service production and delivery, such as the use of ‘line of visibility’ in service blueprints and the modelling of ‘service encounters’, and have created new terms such as ‘value co-creation’. Despite these efforts, recent reviews have identified the lack of an holistic approach to new product-service system (PSS) development. This deficiency needs to be rectified, especially for complex PSS developments in regulated industries such as healthcare, as often there are multiple stakeholders posing conflicting priorities to the development team. This paper describes a novel PSS characterisation approach that supports the early-stage new PSS development process. The approach is originated from eleven healthcare case studies, involving twenty-five new products, services and PSSs. Following the methodology of action research, further cases are selected for the application of the approach to a new product, service or PSS concept in facilitated workshops. Initial implications of employing this approach in three cases are discussed in this paper.