2014-12-02
White paper:
Toward a More Competitive, Sustainable and
Attractive Sweden
Key goals for Sweden are to further improve its competitiveness as a global leading provider of
sustainable solutions, to become more attractive for investors and skilled people, and to create
stimulating and qualified jobs for the increasing population.
The Swedish manufacturing industry is of critical importance to reach these goals. We, companies from
the manufacturing and energy sectors, are now facing two interlinked mega-challenges that certainly will
have a major impact on the business logic of many companies! – and we want to turn these challenges
into opportunities for change and innovation.
Firstly, our society faces major environmental challenges. In order to manage these we need to maintain
our economic growth while decoupling it from resource consumption (including energy consumption).
We need to become more resource efficient, i.e. to reform our businesses to use less, reuse, and preserve
the value of resources.
The second challenge is that industry undergoes a transformation, from providing products or services
toward providing solutions to create value by utilizing their core competence. In this sense, essential
meaning in differentiating the manufacturing and service industries is disappearing. This challenge is a
result of e.g. the growing importance of knowledge and service in our society and the advancement of
information communication technologies (e.g. Internet of Things), as well as society’s goal to decouple
economic growth and resource consumption.
The challenges above provide excellent opportunities for change and innovation that can increase
Swedish companies’ resource efficiency and competitiveness. However, for successfully adapting and
making use of these opportunities, companies need to change their ways of developing, delivering and
managing their solutions. We are sure that knowledge and competence needed for managing these
changes can be co-created with Swedish universities.
Our conclusion is this: to maintain and enhance Swedish industry’s competiveness, making it more
attractive for investors and creating jobs – while (at the same time) enhancing environmental
sustainability – Sweden needs to make substantial strategic investment in research and innovation
regarding the following;
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product-service solutions (with their business models),
lifecycle data management, and
reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling.
To build capacity for these in industry, we need to exploit the existing high potential for close
collaboration for research and innovation between universities and companies in Sweden by reinforcing;
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multi-disciplinary research with the lifecycle perspective,
practitioners’ involvement in defining research issues, and
recruitment of world-leading researchers and practitioners.
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CEO. Hans Holmström
Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery AB
CEO. Anders Jonsson
Tekniska verken i Linköping AB
CEO. Matthias Fischer
Toyota Material Handling Europe AB
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CEO. Stefan Lind
HTC Sweden AB
CEO. Petra Hammarstedt
Qlean Scandinavia AB