Organizational Design and Innovation in the Transition towards Industry 5.0. - A Qualitative Study of Large Swedish Industrial Organizations

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how organizational design can foster innovation and support the transition towards Industry 5.0 within large Swedish industrial organizations. While Industry 5.0 is increasingly associated with human-centricity, sustainability, andresilience, existing research remains largely conceptual or technology-driven, offering limited empirical insight into how organizations structurally operationalize these principles in practice. To address this gap, the study examines how structural arrangements, governance mechanisms, and coordination practices shape innovation processes in three large Swedish companies: Stena, Ragn-Sells, and Volvo Cars. The research adopts a qualitative multiple-case study design and follows an abductive approach. Empirical data were collected through semi-structured interviews with respondents involved in innovation, sustainability, strategy, and organizational development. The interview material was analyzed through thematic analysis, conducted both manually and with the support of ATLAS.ti, and complemented by within-case and cross-case comparison. The findings show that organizational design plays a central role in enabling Industry 5.0-oriented innovation. Four main findings emerged. First, innovation depends on a balance between decentralization and coordination: local autonomy supports ownership and flexibility, but requires coordinating mechanisms to avoid fragmentation and enable alignment across units. Second, innovation is generally embedded in daily organizational work, although this embeddedness is structured differently across companies. Third, the main challenge is not the lack of ideas, but the organizational capacity to support, prioritize, and implement them through resources, protected time, and governance structures. Fourth, human-centricity is already present in practice, even when it is not explicitly formalized under the label of Industry 5.0, particularly through participation, employee voice, leadership, and the reduction of organizational friction. Beyond these four findings, the study suggests that the Swedish organizational environment may function as an enabling context for innovation and Industry 5.0-related transformation. Practices related to trust, participation, dialogue, and decentralized problem solving appeared as relatively natural and institutionally embedded features across the cases. The thesis contributes to the literature by showing that organizational design should be understood as an enabling architecture for innovation in the context of Industry 5.0. It also offers practical implications by highlighting that technological investments alone are insufficient unless supported by organizational arrangements that connect autonomy, coordination, implementation capacity, and human involvement.