Digital servitization and new sustainable configurations of manufacturing systems

Industry 4.0 technologies are dramatically increasing the potential of servitized products, augmenting several times over the reach and the responsiveness of the actors involved. Accordingly, the organization for digital manufacturing is completely disrupted, and the boundaries between users and producers are fading away, new functionalities are emerging, or existing ones are being re-modulated to deliver new unexpressed potential. Digital servitization impacts on the entire body of factors tied to manufacturing process; this paper seeks to simultaneously investigate the technological, social, and environmental levels. Unfortunately, the evolutionary trajectory of the manufacturing process seems to remain quite fuzzy and, most of all, the main factors responsible for the process changes are not clear. Our conceptual study aims to trace the evolutionary path of the manufacturing process based on four determinants: digital reconfiguration of the actors' organization, digital servitization strategy adoption, exaptation of the manufacturing process, and sustainable manufacturing mechanisms. Depending on the determinant level, our conceptual model sketches a process evolutionary trajectory by individuating different archetypes of a sustainable manufacturing process. This conceptual paper extends the previous literature that seems to miss a simultaneous analysis of what is the role of digital servitization in facing environmental changes by adopting a lens of analysis of exaptation which drives system modularity in relation to the sustainability goals and digital servitization potentials.