Industry 5.0 Imperatives and Project-Based Manufacturing: Collaborative Agility as a Translational Capability

Industry 5.0's imperatives of human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience highlight emerging challenges for project-based manufacturing, particularly in balancing customized client requirements with operational efficiency while coordinating diverse stakeholders. Service-oriented approaches offer potential pathways to address these imperatives through collaboration and value cocreation, though it remains unclear how these principles translate into competitive advantage. The critical question is whether implementation mechanisms, specifically adaptive capabilities, are needed to operationalize service-oriented principles in dynamic project environments. This study therefore examines how service-dominant orientation contributes to sustainable competitive advantage through collaborative agility in Brazil's printing industry, a largely project-based manufacturing sector. Using partial least squares structural equation modelling with survey data from 209 organizations, we test whether collaborative agility mediates this relationship. Our results reveal that service-dominant orientation has limited effect on sustainable competitive advantage, but operates entirely through collaborative agility, accounting for 92.9% of the total effect. Among collaborative agility's three dimensions (operational, partnership, and resource agility), partnership agility emerges as the strongest. For project-based organizations navigating Industry 5.0, this suggests that collaborative values deliver results when implemented through agile operational, partnership, and resource management capabilities.