Digital servitization and new sustainable configurations of manufacturing systems

Francesco Schiavone, Daniele Leone, Andrea Caporuscio and Sai Lan

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2022, vol. 176, issue C

Abstract: Industry 4.0 technologies are dramatically increasing the potential of servitized products, augmenting several times over the reach and the responsiveness of the actors involved. Accordingly, the organization for digital manufacturing is completely disrupted, and the boundaries between users and producers are fading away, new functionalities are emerging, or existing ones are being re-modulated to deliver new unexpressed potential. Digital servitization impacts on the entire body of factors tied to manufacturing process; this paper seeks to simultaneously investigate the technological, social, and environmental levels. Unfortunately, the evolutionary trajectory of the manufacturing process seems to remain quite fuzzy and, most of all, the main factors responsible for the process changes are not clear. Our conceptual study aims to trace the evolutionary path of the manufacturing process based on four determinants: digital reconfiguration of the actors' organization, digital servitization strategy adoption, exaptation of the manufacturing process, and sustainable manufacturing mechanisms. Depending on the determinant level, our conceptual model sketches a process evolutionary trajectory by individuating different archetypes of a sustainable manufacturing process. This conceptual paper extends the previous literature that seems to miss a simultaneous analysis of what is the role of digital servitization in facing environmental changes by adopting a lens of analysis of exaptation which drives system modularity in relation to the sustainability goals and digital servitization potentials.

Keywords: Manufacturing systems; Digital servitization; Sustainability; Exaptation; Industry 4.0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162521008726
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:176:y:2022:i:c:s0040162521008726

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121441

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().