Current economic crisis, which is affecting many world regions, namely in Europe, has led to an intensification of discussions around the reindustrialization needs. After decades of industrial decline, due to deliberate policies that advocated an exclusive move toward a service-oriented society, while neglecting the production of tradable goods, many countries are struggling with public and private belt-tightening measures which only accelerate the crisis spiral. Reindustrialization appears as the economic, social, and political process of organizing resources for the purpose of re-establishing / revitalizing industries in order to reinvigorate the economy.
Which role for Collaborative Networks in this process?
Collaboration is essential specially to SMEs in order to acquire critical mass, acquire new markets, and leverage skills. But the re-industrialization cannot simply follow the steps of past century. New perspectives of industry are needed, as exemplified by some current trends such as:
- Focusing on service-enhanced products
- Addressing the full life cycle of products, including refurbishing / retrofitting and recycling
- Taking on board the serious concerns of energy saving and reduction of ecological footprint
- Having a glocal perspective, and relying on co-innovation and co-evolution.
Sustainability issues are clearly in the front row of these trends. Any effective solution in such direction imposes collaboration of multiple stakeholders organized in mixes of dynamic value chain networks. New collaborative systems need to be developed under a well-integrated socio-technical perspective.
PRO-VE 2013 aims to provide an important forum for technical discussions on these issues, share experiences and foster future directions. As such, contributing papers shall include a section on “Contributions to sustainable reindustrialization”, where authors point out their contributions and potential impacts of their results regarding the main theme of the conference.
This conference continues a series of successful conferences of PRO-VE’99 (Porto, Portugal), PRO-VE 2000 (Florianópolis, Brazil), PRO-VE’02 (Sesimbra, Portugal), PRO-VE’03 (Lugano, Switzerland), PRO-VE’04 (Toulouse, France), PRO-VE’05 (Valencia, Spain), PRO-VE’06 (Helsinki, Finland), PRO-VE’07 (Guimarães, Portugal), PRO-VE’08 (Poznan, Poland), PRO-VE’09 (Thessaloniki, Greece), PRO-VE’10 (Saint-Etienne, France), PRO-VE’11 (São Paulo, Brazil), and PRO-VE’12 (Bournemouth, UK).
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