An Integrated Model of Sustainable Production with Perspective in Ecological and Industrial Symbiosis Approaches

The speed of competitiveness and organizational innovation, specifically with respect to corporate sustainability improving functions and environmental stress on manufacturing companies in predicting economic, social, and ecological advantages of their processes and products, significantly increased in the recent decade. This condition faced all manufacturing companies across the world with a new challenge, making them try not only to maintain their current competitive status by developing and implementing sustainable production tools, but also to follow a sustainable progress that considers social, economic, and environmental matters at the same time. This study focused on business sustainability with a new perspective in industrial symbiosis, and tried to develop a sustainable production model through identifying different dimensions of sustainable production from managerial viewpoints of successful manufacturing companies in Semnan Province, Iran. To this end, managers of 33 successful companies across the province with at least five-year continuous work experience were interviewed, using the repertory grid technique. As a result, 33 single individual repertory grids and 175 initial individual constructs of sustainable production were fabricated. Finally, the sustainable collective grid of sustainable production, including 87 secondary constructs within 11 sections were drawn and analyzed through cluster analysis in SPSS. At the end, a sustainable production model with 11 pivots and 87 constructs within 4 sections, along with four production strategies (economic production, lean production, green production, and sustainable production) were proposed