Is There a Smart Sustainability Transition in Manufacturing? Tracking Externalities in Machine Tools over Three Decades

Inéz Labucay

doi:10.3390/su14020838

Abstract

Only one third of studies on the Industry 4.0–sustainability link have been conducted in manufacturing, despite its centrality to “ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns” (UN Sustainable Development Goal nr. 12). The European Ecodesign Directive singled out machine tools as key to the sustainability transition, not least due to their high energy usage and their increasingly becoming enmeshed in cyber-physical production systems. This paper aims to find out whether the digital transformation underway in machine tools is sustainable as well as to identify its central technological pathways. Externalities in machine tools are tracked over three decades (1990–2018) by means of a multi-method setting: (1) mapping the Technological Innovation System (TIS) of machine tools; (2) co-occurrence analysis of transnational patent families, in order to reduce geographical and market distortions (Questel’s FAMPAT); and (3) analysis of the incidence of digital and sustainable technologies in machine tools patent applications (WIPO PATENTSCOPE). A smart sustainability transition is currently not hampered by a lack of smart technologies but rather by the sluggish introduction of sustainable machine tools. Cyber-physical and robot machine tools have been found to be central pathways to a smart sustainability transition. Implications for harnessing externalities reach beyond the machine tools industry.

Highlights

Faculty of Business and Economics, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany; Citation: Labucay, I
In answer to the plea made in the tech-mining approach, which mandates a combination of analysis of scientific literature with patent analysis in order to trace technological trends in an informative, reproducible, and efficient manner [86], this paper investigates the evolution of the machine tools Technological Innovation System (TIS) over the last thirty years by employing a multi-method design
The results of the analyses provided above indicate, contrary to expectations, that a smart sustainability transition is currently not hampered by a lack of smart technologies; rather, at least to date, a greater hindrance is the sluggish introduction of sustainable machine tools

Summary

Introduction

Faculty of Business and Economics, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany; Citation: Labucay, I. The European Ecodesign Directive singled out machine tools as key to the sustainability transition, not least due to their high energy usage and their increasingly becoming enmeshed in cyber-physical production systems. This paper aims to find out whether the digital transformation underway in machine tools is sustainable as well as to identify its central technological pathways. Cyber-physical and robot machine tools have been found to be central pathways to a smart sustainability transition. While the digital transformation is turning manufacturing operations into “smart” integrated networks, for which the term Industry 4.0 has been coined [1,2], a largescale sustainability transition is unfolding in the form of “long-term, multi-dimensional, and fundamental transformation process[es] through which established socio-technical systems shift to more sustainable modes of production and consumption” [3] Industry 4.0 started out as a policy-driven concept, recent studies have shown that it has begun to dominate scientific research agendas on a worldwide scale, research on manufacturing [6,7,8], including machine tools [9]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion