Dynamics of Long-Life Assets: The Editors’ Intro

The manufacturing industry is changing. Driven by a number of concurrent trends, including economic and political development, technological breakthroughs and social connectivity, the impacts on industry in general are fundamental. Companies need to find ways to adapt to this change in collaboration with actors across their value networks. For long-life industrial assets, i.e., industrial product-service systems, both economically and environmentally sustainable solutions become an imperative supported by new business models-based collaborative value creation. In an EU-funded research project twenty organisations including three research institutes, four universities and thirteen companies studied, developed and demonstrated ways to deal with the dynamics of long-life assets. The main findings are summarised in this book. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the topic and presents the structure of the rest of this book.