Dimensions of Production Innovation in Sweden’s Production 2030 Initiative: Insights from a Thematic Portfolio Analysis

Abstract Industrial research and innovation programmes are increasingly judged on improving environmental performance without compromising productivity, yet evaluations often understate how project teams explain expected benefits, intended beneficiaries, and scaling mechanisms. Using 29 open-ended responses from Sweden’s Produktion2030 portfolio, this study analyses how project teams articulate the programme’s underlying change logic. Four recurring dimensions structure these narratives: digitalisation, sustainability, collaboration, and human competence. Digitalisation is described as linking production data to operational decision-making (e.g., monitoring, analytics, traceability, and simulation). Sustainability is framed as embedded in production improvement through resource efficiency, reduced waste, and resilience. Collaboration is presented as essential for diffusion, standardisation, and cross-organisational learning across OEMs, SMEs, suppliers, and academia. Human competence and work environment improvements are described as enabling conditions for adoption. Overall, the findings depict production innovation as a multi-dimensional socio-technical process in which technological, organisational, and human factors reinforce one another. The paper contributes a replicable approach for extracting programme-level theories of change from lightweight project narratives.