Current economic crisis, which is affecting many world
regions, namely in Europe, has led to an intensification of discussions around
the reindustrialization needs. After decades of industrial decline, due to
deliberate policies that advocated an exclusive move toward a service-oriented
society, while neglecting the production of tradable goods, many countries are
struggling with public and private belt-tightening measures which only
accelerate the crisis spiral. Reindustrialization appears as the economic,
social, and political process of organizing resources for the purpose of
re-establishing / revitalizing industries in order to reinvigorate the economy.
Which role for Collaborative Networks in this process?
Collaboration is essential specially to SMEs in order to
acquire critical mass, acquire new markets, and leverage skills. But the
re-industrialization cannot simply follow the steps of past century. New
perspectives of industry are needed, as exemplified by some current trends such
as:
- Focusing on service-enhanced products
- Addressing
the full life cycle of products, including refurbishing / retrofitting and
recycling
- Taking
on board the serious concerns of energy saving and reduction of ecological
footprint
- Having
a glocal perspective, and relying on co-innovation and co-evolution.
Sustainability issues are clearly in the front row of these trends. Any effective solution in such direction imposes collaboration of multiple stakeholders organized in mixes of dynamic value chain networks. New collaborative systems
need to be developed under a well-integrated socio-technical perspective.
PRO-VE 2013 aims to provide an important forum for
technical discussions on these issues, share experiences and foster future
directions. As such, contributing papers shall include a section on
“Contributions to sustainable reindustrialization”, where authors point out
their contributions and potential impacts of their results regarding
the main theme of the conference.
This conference continues a series of successful
conferences of PRO-VE’99 (Porto, Portugal), PRO-VE 2000 (Florianópolis,
Brazil), PRO-VE’02 (Sesimbra, Portugal), PRO-VE’03 (Lugano, Switzerland),
PRO-VE’04 (Toulouse, France), PRO-VE’05 (Valencia, Spain), PRO-VE’06 (Helsinki,
Finland), PRO-VE’07 (Guimarães, Portugal), PRO-VE’08 (Poznan, Poland), PRO-VE’09
(Thessaloniki, Greece), PRO-VE’10 (Saint-Etienne, France), PRO-VE’11 (São
Paulo, Brazil), and PRO-VE’12 (Bournemouth, UK).
