Towards Smaller Value Creation Cycles: Key Factors and their Interdependencies for Local Manufacturing

Abstract

The unpredictable occurrence of a global pandemic and trade conflicts have currently shown us the fra-gility of global, industrial value chains. In contrast to this, local value creation structures have numerous potentials to meet present ecological, economic and social challenges (e.g. increasing the resilience of the manufacturing sector, reducing CO2 emissions through smaller loops of value creation, empowering regional stakeholders). This paper presents a study on local manufacturing designed to achieve a better understanding of the internal systematic of value creation in a local context using a sensitivity analysis. By modelling the causal effects, the direct and indirect influences of internal and environmental factors of local production as well as their independencies can be shown. This in turn will enable scenario anal-yses that show possible developments for local production systems arising due to changing social, politi-cal and technological factors. In the future these options may aid in decision-making processes aiming at a sustainable circular economy.