This essay develops the argument of my lecture on sustainability and innovation at the GSaME annual conference 2026 at the University of Stuttgart.

Innovation acquires much of its appeal from a promise about the future. A new technology will preserve competitiveness, improve production or create possibilities that were previously unavailable. Yet the capacity to secure a company’s future says little, by itself, about the future made possible for others. An innovation can succeed commercially while intensifying pressures on the ecological and social conditions on which economic activity depends.

I argue that sustainability supplies a substantive criterion for judging industrial innovation. This requires examining the overall effects of its use, the business model through which those effects arise and the decisions that determine its purposes. Technical performance matters throughout this assessment. It cannot settle the question of what deserves to be sustained.

In my recent essay on Stuttgart’s industrial transformation, I examined how a region can retain its capacity to act under changing technological and political conditions. The question here concerns the direction of that action. What must an innovation contribute if its claim to a viable future is to have more than a corporate meaning?

The future that sustainability requires

Translating sustainability into future viability removes some of the difficulty that gives the concept its substance. Almost any organisation wishes to remain viable. Sustainability asks whether its activities can be justified within ecological limits and whether they maintain and improve the conditions of a decent life. Those conditions concern people living now, future generations and the nonhuman world. A company’s customer relationships describe only a small part of this responsibility.

The distinction has consequences for measurement. Relative environmental performance compares resource use or emissions with an output such as a product or unit of revenue. It can establish that a process has improved without establishing that its environmental burden is acceptable. In our work on the ecological allowance of enterprise, Barbara Seeberg and I therefore examined an approach to absolute corporate environmental performance (Reichel & Seeberg, 2011). The strategic question concerns the scale of activity that ecological conditions can support, as well as the efficiency with which it is undertaken.

Calling ecological limits non-negotiable does not mean that every threshold can be measured without uncertainty or that science determines a company’s fair share of an allowable burden. Measurement, allocation and implementation require argument. The limits do, however, constrain what can be justified; they cannot be moved to accommodate a preferred return on investment. Human dignity and basic rights likewise place obligations on economic activity. Their force does not depend on a favourable business case.

This leaves difficult decisions about the distribution of burdens, the timing of change and responsibility for its costs. Sustainability makes these decisions more demanding. Where ecological and social conditions have already deteriorated, reducing the rate of further damage will often be insufficient. Industrial innovation must also be assessed for its contribution to improving those conditions.

Efficiency and the business model of enough

Production provides clear measures of technical improvement: lower energy consumption per component, less material loss and fewer unplanned interruptions. Such improvements deserve recognition. Their environmental meaning depends on what happens to total consumption. Under a consistent system boundary, resource use per unit and the number of units together determine the total. A larger volume can outweigh a smaller requirement per unit.

Rebound adds a further complication. Lower costs resulting from improved efficiency can encourage additional demand, eroding the expected savings. Brockway et al. (2021) document the importance of these effects at the level of the economy and the diversity of their mechanisms. Their findings provide no fixed rebound rate for a particular factory or product. They establish why savings inferred from technical performance need to be checked against the effects of actual use.

Digital production technologies require this assessment too. Their operating benefits have to be considered alongside the infrastructure that makes them possible, including hardware and data processing. An evaluation should explain its comparison: which production practice would otherwise have been used, over what period, and with what consequences for existing equipment? A narrow account of the application can leave the additional resources required to operate it outside the calculation.

Sufficiency concerns how needs can be met with less resource use. Customers require functions and services, and these need not always depend on acquiring another product. Extending useful life, repairing a fault or adapting existing equipment can change the resource requirements of meeting that need. The amount and purpose of activity become subjects of innovation in their own right.

In the work Maren Kropfeld and I developed on sufficiency-oriented business models, value creation involves changes in practices shared by businesses and their customers. Durability and repairability depend on materials, skills and an understanding of what adequate provision means. Customers participate in practices through which products are used and maintained, rather than simply receiving a finished value proposition (Kropfeld & Reichel, 2021). This gives sufficiency an organisational and relational dimension that a more efficient product alone cannot supply.

For industry, the revenue question follows directly. A producer whose customers replace equipment less frequently needs a way to support continued use while financing its own activities. Maintenance and modernisation can contribute to such a model. Digital information may help establish equipment condition and organise interventions. Whether these arrangements reduce material throughput and remain economically workable has to be demonstrated. The existence of a service contract settles neither question.

My work on entrepreneurial sufficiency examines the possibilities and constraints of pursuing such strategies from a post-growth perspective (Reichel, 2025). A company whose financing depends on continuously increasing sales volumes faces a conflict when it seeks to reduce throughput. The conflict belongs within strategic analysis. Expecting less resource use while leaving the dependence on ever larger material sales untouched gives the company incompatible instructions. Efficiency and sufficiency therefore have to be examined together with the financial conditions of value creation.

The direction of resilience and regeneration

Changing production and business models requires capacities that persist through the transition. Resilience draws attention to this requirement. Holling’s (1973) ecological account concerns the persistence of systems under disturbance, distinguishing it from stability understood as a return to equilibrium. In industrial strategy, this invites attention to the functions that must remain available when supplies, markets or technologies change. Reserves, alternative sources and retained expertise can matter even when they carry costs under ordinary operating conditions.

Resilience nevertheless leaves an evaluative question open. A resource-intensive production system may be highly capable of surviving disruption. Its persistence offers no sufficient reason to preserve it. We need to specify which functions deserve continuity, for whom and under what conditions. Otherwise, resilience can protect precisely the dependencies that a sustainability transition needs to change.

Regeneration provides a more demanding direction. I understand it as strengthening the capacity of ecological and social systems to renew and develop. In my earlier discussion of regeneration as an economic policy paradigm, I emphasised this forward orientation (Reichel, 2022). The relevant aim is to improve the conditions under which life and social development remain possible. A return to an earlier state may be unavailable, particularly where ecological changes are irreversible.

Research on regenerative business models connects this orientation with planetary health and societal wellbeing, extending value creation to nature and society beyond immediate contractual stakeholders (Konietzko et al., 2023).

This also sharpens the question of growth. Ecological functioning, knowledge and meaningful participation can increase while damaging emissions and material flows decline. An aggregate commitment to growth obscures these different directions. Industrial assessment should examine them separately. Similarly, qualification, health and employees’ ability to influence technical systems are productive social conditions. Treating them solely as expenses makes their contribution to the continuity and development of production difficult to recognise.

Care is needed with the terminology. Keeping a machine in use may avoid material consumption; it does not by itself regenerate an ecosystem. Its contribution can still be valuable without that stronger claim. Where regeneration is claimed, the assessment must establish which ecological or social capacity improves, how the innovation contributes and what evidence would challenge the conclusion. A benefit elsewhere cannot excuse a violation of basic rights or an unacceptable ecological loss. New vocabulary should not make old accounting evasions easier.

Strategic judgment before and within calculation

These assessments require data, models and disciplinary expertise. They also require decisions about what the assessment is for. Objectives, system boundaries and time horizons shape the result before the first calculation is completed. Selecting which consequences enter a model already entails a judgment about relevance. A technically sound calculation can consequently support an inadequately justified decision.

I use strategic judgment, or Urteilskraft, to describe the capacity to form a defensible decision where specialist knowledge does not uniquely determine the outcome. Heinz von Foerster’s (2003) discussion of undecidable questions locates freedom and responsibility precisely in decisions that no predetermined procedure can settle. I have developed the broader implications for strategy elsewhere. Here, the important implication is that judgment also enters the framing of questions that can subsequently be calculated.

An industrial decision about retaining equipment illustrates the difficulty. Continued use may preserve a needed function and avoid replacement impacts. It may also reflect an unwillingness to reconsider an investment already made. Establishing which interpretation is warranted requires evidence about future use and available alternatives. Past expenditure cannot supply that evidence. The same scrutiny applies to digital systems: the appropriate technical scale depends on the task, its requirements and the additional dependencies each option creates.

Judgment carries responsibility for purposes as well as consequences. Ecological limits are not preferences to be selected by the decision-maker. Judgment concerns the justified ways of acting within them, including how burdens are distributed and whose opportunities are restricted. Freedom to choose a course of action does not imply freedom to define away its obligations.

Organisations can support this capacity through their decision practices. A proposal should disclose its consequential assumptions, identify the alternatives considered and explain who is affected. It should make clear which findings follow from evidence and which depend on a chosen objective or an uncertain expectation. This gives disagreement an identifiable object. It also allows a decision to be assessed later without rewriting its original rationale in the light of events.

Dissent then needs influence. Employees who operate or maintain a system may recognise consequences absent from its formal specification. Their objections must be able to change the proposal, rather than appear only in the record of consultation. The responsible innovation framework developed by Stilgoe et al. (2013) connects anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness. In the present context, I take responsiveness to require an organisational capacity to act on what scrutiny reveals.

Before implementation, responsibility for review should be assigned and the grounds for reconsideration specified. Revision cannot always restore the previous situation. Infrastructure can bind activity for decades, and some ecological damage cannot be undone. The less reversible a commitment is, the stronger the prior scrutiny it requires. Learning from consequences remains necessary, but it cannot replace care before consequences become irreversible.

The conditions under which innovation can contribute

A company acts within markets, financing arrangements and public rules. These conditions can make repair unattractive or require expected sales growth to justify investment. An individual firm may change some of its practices and still encounter incentives working against its sustainability objectives. This is a substantive constraint on strategy, with implications for institutional change.

Public choices about resource use, product requirements and the allocation of environmental costs therefore belong within the account of industrial transformation. Repairability requirements can change what producers need to design for. Resource incentives can change the economic comparison between extending use and replacing equipment. The costs and opportunities of such changes will be distributed unevenly, requiring political justification and attention to those bearing the burden. Companies can contribute knowledge and proposals to this process. Their own definitions of sustainability cannot replace collectively legitimate rules.

Research and development need to investigate how technical possibilities interact with these conditions. My work on Sustainability 4.0 treated digitalisation as a social phenomenon whose contribution to sustainability depends on its relationship with ecological and social requirements (Reichel, 2019). A successful demonstration establishes something about technical capability. The consequences of widespread use depend additionally on the organisation of production, customer practices and the way revenues are earned.

The GSaME provides a relevant setting for this extended investigation. Its doctoral model connects engineering, business administration and computer science with research in companies and other research organisations. That combination makes it possible to examine a technical solution together with its conditions of use. The opportunity requires disciplines to let one another’s questions affect how the problem is defined.

For a digital production application, engineering analysis can examine additional infrastructure requirements and effects on existing equipment. Management research can investigate the incentives for longer use and the business model supporting it. Research on work and organisation can establish which competencies employees need and how they can influence the system. These inquiries should inform a shared assessment of the application under actual operating conditions. Evaluating technical performance first and adding social and environmental questions afterwards can leave consequential design choices beyond scrutiny.

Such research should compare alternatives, explain its system boundaries and follow outcomes over time. It should also identify the decisions that remain open after the evidence has been assembled and the actors responsible for making them. The conditions enabling a sustainability contribution become part of the development task. A technically functioning product whose use depends on incompatible incentives still presents an unresolved research and strategic problem.

Industrial innovation earns a defensible claim to future viability through its contribution to improving life within ecological and social constraints. An individual technology need not regenerate an ecosystem on its own. Its use must make an assessable contribution to a sustainable change in value creation. That assessment concerns those who benefit, those who bear the burdens and the nonhuman conditions affected by both. Strategic judgment is exercised in making these relationships visible and accepting responsibility for the choices they require.