Editorial

In an ever-changing world, the roles of product development, business innovation, advanced manufacturing, service delivery and end-of-life management become increasingly important to enhance the competitiveness of industrial companies. The boundaries between disciplines soften and it is increasingly apparent that the scope for innovation and market disruption is to be found in the careful integration of numerous life cycle activities as the object of design. Industrial Product/Service-Systems (IPSS) are one answer to this development, offering solutions towards the conceptualisation, design, planning and deployment of new solutions and value propositions in fundamentally different ways than before. Implicit in the philosophy behind IPSS is to create customer-oriented solutions that function for longer and thus increase resource productivity, minimise resource consumption and enhance the ultimate value-add to the end user. In this context, PSS solutions have a great potential to enable the transition to a Circular Economy, where the goal is to think in circular product- and system life cycles, rather than our current linear “take-make-waste” paradigm. This Procedia CIRP Special Issue collects manuscripts from the 9th CIRP IPSS Conference, IPSS2017, which focused its theme on “Circular Perspectives on Product/Service-Systems”. With this theme, the conference, and therefore these manuscripts, have explored how the transition to a Circular Economy can be supported by PSS, in terms of life cycle, sustainability, optimisation, design and user satisfaction. The Special Issue is organised in five complementary and synergic tracks, offering a holistic and systemic view on the circular perspectives of PSS.