Life cycle theory of value creation - context and perspectives

Ensuring sustainability in industrial value creation is one of the fundamental challenges of the present. Meanwhile, a variety of developments in industrial practice clearly show contrary tendencies, e.g. increased complexity, reduced product life time, creation of new needs. Within elaborate frameworks and methodological principles, life cycle engineering has been an essential basis for a more forward-looking development of technologies and the resulting value creation systems for several years. Concurrently, recent studies show that this development is largely characterized by convincing visions in the sense of theoretically sound, tangible, application-oriented narratives. This illustrates the importance of the narrative of sustainable value creation, the concretization of which is elementary for the transfer to decision-making and technological applications in companies as well as for methodological development in the scientific community. In order to adequately support decision-makers in companies in the appropriate (re)design of existing and future value creation systems in terms of sustainability, the theoretical foundation of life cycle engineering must be given greater importance. This paper therefore introduces ‘life cycle theory of value creation’ as a new dimension of life cycle engineering. Based on a review of the current literature, the author presents conceptual thoughts on the context, outlines both a regulatory and an analytical framework and identifies perspectives for research and development.