Sustainability-driven innovation: technologies, methodologies and business models for a more sustainable manufacturing

Abstract

Sustainability has become a common theme in many knowledge areas. Most farsighted manufacturing enterprises started investing on sustainability to seize the opportunity of such a global trend: being sustainable is becoming a picklock for accessing most demanding customers, and a lever to differentiate from lower wages countries productions. In fact, the manufacturing sector lies at the core of industrial economies, and consumers start requesting production to be made sustainable in order to preserve the high standard of living achieved by industrialized societies. Sustainability declarations, becoming more and more frequent especially in large enterprises, have forced a wider number of manufacturing companies in including sustainability-related objectives in their strategies. However, translating such a strategy into sustainability-virtuous operational behaviours is still a not-fully-answered concern for managers. In fact, literature is full of methodologies promising more sustainable performances for adopters, but practical tools intended for actual decision-makers are few and just partial (in terms of contexts of use, addressed product lifecycle phases, pondered sustainability dimensions, target users). Moreover, a wide plethora of manufacturing technologies are available or are being developed taking into account both the technical and the environmental performances, but which is the most pertinent solution for a given decision maker? The here presented thesis work aims at paving the way towards the future of sustainability implementation in manufacturing contexts, providing a detailed overview on the founding pillars of the sustainability-related manufacturing paradigm and including technologies, methodologies, and business models aspiring to become practical tools for the sustainability-driven innovator. Practical examples will be performed also including specific technological solutions developed by the author (and other researchers) in order to demonstrate the achievability of the mentioned goal.