The landscape of industrial management is undergoing a profound transformation that extends far beyond the digitalization agenda introduced by Industry 4.0. Over the past decade, organizations have invested heavily in artificial intelligence, cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, robotics, and advanced analytics to improve productivity and operational efficiency. While these technological advances have fundamentally reshaped manufacturing and service operations, they have also revealed the limitations of a purely technology-centric perspective. Increasing environmental uncertainty, societal expectations, workforce transformation, and sustainability challenges have shifted managerial attention from maximizing operational performance alone toward creating broader economic, environmental, and social value. As a result, Industry 5.0 has emerged not as a replacement for Industry 4.0, but as its strategic evolution—one that places human well-being, resilience, sustainability, and collaborative intelligence at the center of industrial development (Troisi et al., 2024; Enose Kamalabai et al., 2025).
This evolution reflects a deeper paradigm shift in the way organizations understand value creation. Traditionally, industrial systems were designed as relatively linear, efficiency-driven entities that optimized internal resources and operational processes. Success was primarily measured through productivity, cost reduction, quality improvement, and financial performance. However, the increasing interconnectedness of markets, technologies, stakeholders, and societal expectations has fundamentally challenged this logic. Modern organizations no longer operate as isolated production systems but as participants in dynamic ecosystems where value is co-created through continuous interactions among firms, customers, suppliers, governments, technology providers, research institutions, and society at large. Consequently, industrial management is gradually moving from managing organizational boundaries toward orchestrating interconnected ecosystems capable of generating shared and sustainable value (Jourabchi Amirkhizi et al., 2025; Mouazen et al., 2025). Industry 5.0 provides the conceptual foundation for this transition by redefining the relationship between technology, people, and organizations. Rather than viewing digital technologies as ends in themselves, the Industry 5.0 paradigm emphasizes their role as enablers of human-centered innovation, sustainable development, and resilient industrial ecosystems. This perspective recognizes that artificial intelligence, robotics, digital twins, blockchain, and advanced automation create their greatest impact when they augment human creativity, support collaborative decision-making, and contribute to societal well-being instead of merely replacing human labor (Khosravy et al., 2023). In this context, technological intelligence and human intelligence become complementary capabilities, jointly shaping organizational adaptability and long-term competitiveness. Such a transition represents one of the most significant conceptual departures in the history of industrial revolutions.
Equally important is the growing recognition that value itself has become a multidimensional construct. The industrial logic of maximizing shareholder returns is increasingly giving way to a broader understanding of value that simultaneously encompasses economic prosperity, environmental stewardship, social inclusion, knowledge creation, and stakeholder well-being. Recent studies argue that Industry 5.0 introduces an entirely new hierarchy of value priorities in which technological advancement is meaningful only when it contributes to sustainable development and human welfare (Jourabchi Amirkhizi et al., 2025). This emerging perspective aligns closely with the principles of the triple bottom line and Innovation 5.0, where organizational success is measured not only by operational outcomes but also by the capacity to generate long-term societal and environmental benefits through collaborative innovation ecosystems (Mouazen et al., 2025).
The transition toward intelligent ecosystems also requires a fundamental rethinking of organizational architecture. Rather than optimizing individual processes independently, organizations must coordinate increasingly complex networks of cyber-physical systems, digital platforms, intelligent machines, human expertise, and distributed decision-making capabilities. Recent research suggests that competitive advantage in Industry 5.0 will depend less on the adoption of individual technologies and more on the capability to integrate heterogeneous technological, organizational, and human resources into coherent ecosystem architectures (Ordieres-Meré et al., 2023; Amirkhizi et al., 2024). Such integration enables continuous learning, adaptive decision-making, knowledge sharing, and resilience across organizational boundaries, allowing industrial ecosystems to respond more effectively to uncertainty and disruption.
Another defining characteristic of this new industrial paradigm is the convergence of digital ecosystems and collaborative innovation networks. The rapid expansion of digital platforms has transformed traditional value chains into interconnected ecosystems in which multiple actors simultaneously create, exchange, and capture value. These ecosystems facilitate mass customization, knowledge diffusion, service innovation, and sustainable resource utilization while strengthening organizational agility and responsiveness (Babkin et al., 2022). At the same time, advances in industrial artificial intelligence are enabling more sophisticated forms of human–machine collaboration, where intelligent systems augment managerial capabilities through predictive analytics, cognitive decision support, autonomous coordination, and real-time optimization rather than simply automating repetitive tasks (Khosravy et al., 2023). This convergence signals an important shift from technology deployment toward ecosystem orchestration. Against this backdrop, this editorial argues that the future of industrial management lies not merely in building smarter factories or adopting more advanced digital technologies, but in redesigning industrial systems as intelligent, human-centered, and sustainable ecosystems. The articles presented in this issue collectively illustrate different dimensions of this transformation, ranging from digital servitization and industrial symbiosis to healthcare ecosystems, customer-centric supply chains, innovation systems, renewable energy, cybersecurity, and intelligent decision-making. Together, they reveal that the next frontier of industrial management is defined by the ability to orchestrate complex ecosystems where technology, people, knowledge, and sustainability interact to create shared value. By synthesizing emerging insights from Industry 5.0 scholarship and connecting them with the diverse contributions of this issue, this editorial seeks to frame a broader conversation on how industrial management can move beyond system optimization toward ecosystem intelligence, ultimately redefining value creation for a more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable industrial future.