Leadership in Sustainability

Abstract

In the last decades the innovation in engineering has been focused on producing reliable products and services. Also the international standards for work place safety, machine directive for safety and functional safety of a product have been considered. Usually such paradigm shifts in engineering mean that you must develop functions and services in these fields to sustain your leadership on the market. A new development in the last 10 years is the growing importance of social responsibility (Messnarz, 2014) based on the new published ISO 26000 standard (ISO 26000, 2010) for social responsibility. Based on that growing social awareness of industry and society new functions, features and services are developing which will form a large part of innovation in the next decade. This paper gives some outlook into that future. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.