While companies and whole industries are still in the middle of the Industry 4.0 revolution, the next tech revolution is well on its way—Industry 5.0. According to the European Union it “provides a vision of industry that aims beyond efficiency and productivity as the sole goals, and reinforces the role and the contribution of industry to society.”

Industry 5.0 implies three major transitions away from business as usual today.

Transition 1: From Technology-Centric to Human-Centric
In previous revolutions, the focus was largely on replacing people by technology (artificial intelligence and robotics), first replacing their hands (manual labor), and later on also their heads (intelligence). Industry 5.0 is all about a symbiotic relation between the two, putting people center-stage as an organization’s key stakeholder.

Transition 2: From Efficiency-Focused to Resilience-Focused
The holy grail of business in the past two centuries has been efficiency. Accordingly, the focus has been on optimization, lean, cost-reduction, waste reduction, and so on. In Industry 5.0, the focus shifts to resilience, to an organization’s robustness and adaptiveness to survive or even thrive in challenging circumstances.

Transition 3: From Profit-Driven to Sustainability-Driven
So far, short-term profit and shareholder value have been major drivers of our economy and corporations. Of the well known triple bottom line (3Ps), Profit had priority over People and Planet. Industry 5.0 is all about rebalancing the three from a long-term societal and ecosystem point of view.

Behind the three transitions is a shift in paradigm that we can capture by a change of metaphors. If we were to pick one metaphor for business in the previous four industrial revolutions, it is a machine. In contrast, Industry 5.0 takes life itself as a metaphor. Change the metaphor and you change business.

Whether one finds this appealing or daunting will differ greatly between companies and between people. But given the current major challenges and crises that we are facing, it is evident that Industry 5.0 is a plausible answer. Once organizations—and as a result societies—are becoming more human-centric, resilient, and sustainable, we can expect solutions to emerge.

Where will your organization be in 2023 in the light of the shift toward Industry 5.0?

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