The Deriss Society 5.0 Vision: A Blueprint for Human-Centric European Innovation
1.0 Introduction: The Digital Age Dilemma and the Need for a New Paradigm
The current technological era, defined by the digital transformation of Industry 4.0, has delivered unprecedented global connectivity. Yet, this progress has created a profound paradox: while we are more connected than ever, we are also experiencing heightened digital isolation, a decline in authentic experiences, and a steady erosion of cultural and spiritual values. This "Digital Age Dilemma" is the critical challenge of our time, demanding a paradigm shift that moves beyond the singular pursuit of technological efficiency.
The tech-obsessed phase of Industry 4.0 is now giving way to Industry 5.0, a new model that reorients innovation around human well-being. This transition recognizes that technology must serve humanity, not the other way around.
This foundational document is therefore more than an introduction; it is an urgent response to a critical inflection point for European innovation. It serves as the cornerstone of a multi-part research series from Deriss.com, architecting a future where technology enhances human dignity and fosters sustainable prosperity by strategically merging the European Union's Industry 5.0 principles with the broader, holistic vision of Japan's Society 5.0. We begin with the European Union's official framework—a vital starting point, but not the final destination.
2.0 The European Foundation: The Three Pillars of a Human-Centric Industry
The European Commission’s Industry 5.0 framework serves as the recognized policy backbone for the future of European industries. Its strategic importance lies in its official re-architecture of innovation away from efficiency as the sole objective. Instead, it places human and societal well-being at the core of technological advancement, reinforcing industry's role as a contributor to society at large while respecting critical planetary boundaries. This vision is built upon three foundational pillars: human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience.
2.1 Pillar 1: Human-Centric Innovation
At its core, human-centricity is the principle that technology should be designed to "support and empower, rather than replace, workers." This signals a fundamental re-architecture of innovation from the automation-only mindset of Industry 4.0 toward a new era where humans and machines work in tandem. In this model, Artificial Intelligence (AI) serves to augment human creativity, critical thinking, and decision-making. The European Commission posits that this synergy not only enhances productivity but also makes industries more resilient and sustainable, proving that a people-first approach is a powerful driver of performance.
Examples of Human-Centric Innovation in Practice:
• AI-Augmented Personalization: In sectors like luxury retail and hospitality, AI algorithms can be used to deliver deeply personalized products and services tailored to a client's unique story and preferences. Crucially, humans retain control over final decisions and ethical boundaries, ensuring technology serves to enhance dignity and privacy. One experimental platform demonstrates this by merging AI matchmaking with narrative user profiles to "amplify human connection rather than replace it," illustrating how technology can deepen relationships instead of dehumanizing them.
• "Human-in-the-Loop" Creativity: This concept positions AI as a creative assistant rather than an autonomous creator. For example, event planners can use AI simulations to model various crowd arrangements for a festival to optimize safety and flow. However, the final judgment rests with human experts, who apply their contextual understanding and emotional intelligence to curate an experience that is not just efficient but emotionally resonant. Here, AI handles the complex data processing, while humans guide the outcome.
2.2 Pillar 2: Sustainability and Societal Value
The sustainability pillar mandates that industry must innovate in ways that help restore our planet and uplift society, a goal that aligns directly with Europe’s Green Deal. This principle reframes the purpose of industry, pushing it to create value beyond pure profit. By leveraging technology, companies can reduce carbon emissions, eliminate waste through circular models, and contribute to the well-being of the communities they serve.
Examples of Sustainability-Focused Innovation in Practice:
• Circular Experience Design: This involves shifting from linear, one-off sales to circular, service-oriented models. A prime example is a fashion company developing an AI-driven platform for high-end clothing rental and resale. By extending the life of garments through reuse and sharing, such "haute couture rental ecosystems" can significantly reduce fashion waste, as identified in Deriss research. Technology here enables a new business model that is both profitable and sustainable.
• Tech-Enabled Carbon Accountability: Digital tools can be used to minimize and neutralize the ecological footprint of events and experiences. A music festival, for instance, might use blockchain technology to transparently track and offset its carbon footprint in real-time. By making sustainability a visible and verifiable part of the customer experience, this approach turns responsible practice into a source of brand value and deeper engagement.
2.3 Pillar 3: Resilience and Collaborative Ecosystems
The third pillar, resilience, is the capacity for industries to absorb shocks, adapt to disruptions, and continue to serve society—a lesson learned with stark clarity from the COVID-19 pandemic. Resilience is not merely about having contingency plans; it is about fundamentally redesigning ecosystems to be more adaptable and collaborative. This is achieved by diversifying supply chains, fostering cross-sector cooperation, and investing in human upskilling to ensure the workforce can evolve with changing markets and technologies.
Examples of Fostering Resilience in Practice:
• Risk-Intelligent Collaboration: This involves creating frameworks where diverse stakeholders—such as companies, banks, and startups—work together to manage shared risks. A practical example is a financing program that uses an "Industry 5.0 scorecard" to evaluate projects based on metrics like employee retraining efforts, community engagement, and crisis response capacity. Businesses that score high on these human-centric indicators receive favorable investment terms, incentivizing the entire ecosystem to prioritize long-term resilience.
• Crisis-Responsive Innovation Networks: These are agile, cross-sector networks designed to form rapidly in response to disruptions. During a pandemic, for instance, "pop-up innovation clusters" could emerge where a luxury fashion house, health experts, and engineers team up to produce stylish and effective PPE. By combining their distinct expertise, these networks can solve urgent problems in real-time, demonstrating a collective resilience that no single entity could achieve alone.
Industry 5.0 provides a powerful blueprint for industrial transformation, yet its focus on the workplace leaves critical societal challenges unaddressed. To truly architect a future that serves all people, we must expand our vision to encompass domains like smart aging, lifelong learning, and digital well-being—areas where a purely industrial framework falls short. This imperative leads us beyond Europe's current policy to a more holistic model.
3.0 The Broader Horizon: Integrating Japan's Holistic Society 5.0
While Industry 5.0 offers a powerful framework for industrial policy, a more comprehensive societal vision is needed to address wider challenges ranging from digital inclusion to public health and lifelong learning. Japan's Society 5.0 provides this holistic model. Introduced in 2016, it envisions a "super-smart society" that seamlessly integrates cyberspace and physical space to solve complex social problems through technology.
Where Industry 5.0 is primarily focused on industrial policy and manufacturing, the scope of Society 5.0 is significantly broader. Its key tenets include:
• Digital inclusion and equity
• AI governance aligned with public benefit
• Human empowerment and quality of life
• Social capital and trust as assets
These principles powerfully align with the core mission of Deriss and the Nirvana Diamond project. Our work on building privacy-first experiences, pioneering ethical AI in creative economies, defining sustainable luxury, and architecting carbon-neutral futures directly corresponds to the holistic goals of Society 5.0.
Deriss does not see these frameworks as mutually exclusive. Instead of choosing between them, we are pioneering a hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both to create a uniquely European model for human-centric innovation.
4.0 The Deriss Synthesis: Architecting a European Society 5.0
The core thesis of Deriss.com is that the future of European innovation lies in a hybrid approach—one that leverages the EU's recognized Industry 5.0 framework as its policy backbone while integrating the broader, humanistic layer of Japan's Society 5.0. This strategy positions Deriss as a vital bridge between a pragmatic industrial policy and a visionary societal blueprint.
This dual framework allows us to operate on two essential levels. Industry 5.0 provides the EU legitimacy and a practical roadmap for industrial transformation in areas like manufacturing, supply chains, and green technology. Simultaneously, Society 5.0 adds the crucial societal layer, extending the principles of human-centric innovation to vital domains such as health and smart aging, creativity and culture, education, and digital well-being. This synergy is profound: an Industry 5.0 principle like Human-Centric Innovation provides the industrial method for achieving a Society 5.0 goal like Smart Aging, demonstrating how the "how" of our industries can directly serve the "why" of our society.
Stockholm's unique intersection of social innovation, cutting-edge design, deep-rooted sustainability, and high levels of digital trust makes it the ideal launchpad for this synthesized vision. From here, we can align with EU policy while leading a pan-European conversation on a future that is both technologically advanced and profoundly human.
5.0 Applying the Blueprint: The Deriss Research Drivers
This foundational document is the cornerstone of a multi-part research program. Each "Driver" will apply this synthesized framework to a specific domain, publishing actionable research that translates vision into practice. Each installment demonstrates how an Industry 5.0 pillar can be leveraged to solve a broader Society 5.0 challenge—from using human-centric design to ensure empathic tech in travel, to applying sustainability principles to create carbon-neutral cultural experiences.
The research series will explore the following drivers:
1. Driver 1: Privacy-First, Voice-First AI: Focusing on the future of human-computer interaction through conversational design, ambient computing, and the establishment of post-screen trust.
2. Driver 2: Sustainable Luxury & Ethical Craft: Exploring circularity, AI-driven personalization, and the creation of social value in the fashion and luxury goods sectors.
3. Driver 3: Carbon-Neutral Events & Experiences: Investigating regenerative culture and measurable sustainability to transform the events industry.
4. Driver 4: Creative Economies & Symbiotic AI: Examining the role of human-in-the-loop design, digital authorship, and generative trust in creative fields.
5. Driver 5: Travel, Hospitality & Empathic Tech: Designing seamless, zero-friction experiences that enhance convenience while protecting human dignity.
6. Driver 6+: The series will continue to explore other critical areas, including wellness, entertainment, education, and smart aging.
Each chapter will be published as public research at Deriss.com/research, collectively culminating in a living, adaptable European model of Society 5.0.
6.0 Conclusion: A Call to Architect a Values-Driven Future
The Deriss Society 5.0 framework offers a compelling vision for the future—one where technological advancement is inextricably interwoven with human dignity, environmental stewardship, and resilient prosperity. It provides a roadmap for building an innovation ecosystem that serves the public good, enriches people’s lives, and addresses our most pressing global challenges.
This is a direct call to the architects of our future: policymakers, industry decision-makers, product designers, AI researchers, and investors. Join us in this vital mission. Together, we can shape a European Society 5.0 that is inclusive, ethical, and built to last—a society where innovation is measured not just by economic output, but by the quality of life and resilience we build for everyone.
Deriss.com is not just participating in the future—we are architecting it. This is not merely an alternative path; it is the blueprint for a resilient and humane European legacy. The future is not something we predict; it is something we build. Join us in its architecture.
