Identifying industry 5.0 contributions to sustainable development: A strategy roadmap for delivering sustainability values

Scholars believe that the newly introduced Industry 5.0 has the potential to move beyond the profit-centered productivity of Industry 4.0 and to promote sustainable development goals such as human-centricity, socio-environmental sustainability, and resilience. However, little has been done to understand how this ill-defined phenomenon may deliver its indented sustainability values despite these speculative promises. To address this knowledge gap, the present study developed a strategy roadmap that explains the mechanism by which Industry 5.0 delivers its intended sustainable development functions. The study first developed and introduced the Industry 5.0 reference model that describes the technical and functional properties of this phenomenon. The study further conducted a content-centric synthesis of the literature and identified the sustainable development functions of Industry 5.0. Next, the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) technique was employed to identify the sequential relationships among the functions and construct the Industry 5.0-enabled model of sustainable development. The ISM involved collecting the opinions of 11 Industry 5.0 experts through expert panel meetings. Results revealed that Industry 5.0 delivers sustainable development values through 16 functions. Circular intelligent products, employee technical assistance, intelligent automation, open sustainable innovation, renewable integration, and supply chain adaptability are examples of the functions identified. These functions are highly interrelated and should be developed in a specific order so that the synergies and complementarities among them would maximize the sustainable development value gains. The roadmap to Industry 5.0-driven sustainability developed in this study is expected to provide a better understanding of ways Industry 5.0 can contribute to sustainable development, explaining how the development of its functions should be managed to maximize their synergies and contribution to the intended sustainability values. The study also highlights important avenues for future research, emphasizing the potential enablers of Industry 5.0 development, such as Government 5.0 or Corporate Governance 5.0.