Industry 4.0, innovation,and sustainable development: A systematic review and a roadmap to sustainable innovation

Despite the recent interest in the Industry 4.0 applications for sustainability, little is known on the processes through which digital transformation and Industry 4.0 technologies enable sustainable innovation in manufacturing. The present study addresses this knowledge gap by developing a strategic roadmap that explains how businesses can leverage Industry 4.0 technologies to introduce sustainability into innovative practices. For this purpose, the study conducts a systematic review of extant literature to identify Industry 4.0 functions for sustainable innovation and applies interpretive structural modeling to devise the promised roadmap. The results offer interesting insights into Industry 4.0 applications for sustainable innovation. The strategic roadmap developed reveals that Industry 4.0 enables sustainable innovation through 11 functions. Industry 4.0 and the underlying digital technologies and principles allow businesses to improve interfunctional collaboration and better integrate with internal and external stakeholders. Industry 4.0 further improves the knowledge base and advanced manufacturing competency and promotes organizational capabilities valuable to sustainable innovation such as green absorptive capacity, sustainable partnership, and sustainable innovation orientation. Through these functions, Industry 4.0 subsequently enhances green process innovation capacity and the ability to develop or reintroduce eco-friendly products economically and competitively. Overall, the roadmap explains the complex precedence relationships among the 11 sustainable innovation functions of Industry 4.0, offering important implications for businesses that seek to leverage Industry 4.0 sustainability implications and manage sustainable development.     

An axiomatic definition of the leximin

For a class of multicriterion decision making problems the set of lexicographic minimax in a set of alternatives with regard to the given criterion functions is characterized by six axioms: symmetry, independence of irrelevant alternatives, domination, separability, convexity, and monotone transformation. Each of the axioms is independent of the rest.