Circular Velocity Excellence (CVEx) Cluster

Critical Product and Production Development Technologies for Accelerated Circular Industrial Transformation

How can Sweden move faster from brilliant research ideas to real industrial solutions that are sustainable, circular and competitive? This is the central question behind the Circular Velocity Excellence cluster, CVEx.

Note: Circular Velocity Excellence (CVEx) is a proposed national excellence cluster currently under formation. The cluster has not yet been formally established and no funding decisions have been made.

CVEx: The engine for Sweden's next industrial leap

Circular Velocity expresses both speed and direction. It is not only about doing today’s product development and production faster. Moving past Fordism and lean manufacturing, this new paradigm aims to create a scientific and industrial capability to design, materialize, use, maintain, repair, remanufacture, repurpose, and recycle complex solutions across their full lifecycle.

Illustration of the CVEx innovation model. Competence areas including production systems, AI and digitalisation, materials and manufacturing technologies, and supply chains contribute to the design of products and systems. Designs are realised into solutions that are used throughout their lifecycle. Data continuously connects design, realisation, and use.

CVEx integrates expertise from multiple domains to connect design, realisation, and use across the full lifecycle, with data serving as an enabling and integrating resource. (Novel logic to connect domain expertise early, illustration from CVEx Prestudy)

The vision: by 2035, CVEx will have established Sweden as a world-leading environment for tenfold faster circular industrial transformation through excellence in science and innovation in advanced production technologies, digital lifecycle solutions and human-centred organisational capability for a sustainable, circular and resilient society.

A central objective of CVEx is to strengthen Sweden's long-term innovation capability in critical technologies and advanced production systems.

Why it matters?

The challenge is urgent:

Competitive pressure: Sweden is one of Europe’s leading industrial nations, with manufacturing generating more than 80% of Swedish exports and underpinning much of the country’s innovation capacity. At the same time, competition is shifting towards advanced technologies, digitalisation, electrification and control of critical industrial value chains. Moreover, Sweden's share of global GDP has declined over recent decades, while countries such as China and India have substantially increased their economic weight and industrial capabilities, and have established competitiveness through value chain leadership in strategic technologies.

Competing in an Age of Discontinuity: Swedish industry must transform far faster to meet climate targets, geopolitical uncertainty, resource scarcity, defence needs, skills shortages and global competition, while adopting rapid advances in electrification, advanced materials, automation, digitalisation, AI and circular economy. Incremental improvement is no longer sufficient.

Unique growth opportunity: The European Union's proposed Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) sets a strategic target to increase the share of manufacturing in EU GDP to at least 20% by 2035, up from 14.3% in 2024.

The research challenge

For Sweden, maintaining industrial leadership requires more than scientific excellence. It requires research excellence in transforming science into impact. A scientific discovery alone is not yet a breakthrough.

Breakthrough technologies emerge and create impact only when scientific discoveries are successfully materialized products, production systems, and sustainable and resilient value chains, that deliver the required precision, quality, sustainability, safety, cost and scale.

This points to an emerging scientific frontier: understanding and accelerating the processes by which discoveries are transformed into robust, scalable and circular industrial systems. The strategic challenge facing Sweden is therefore not only to generate breakthrough technology, but to accelerate the transformation of technology into industrial and societal impact. This is the capability that CVEx seeks to establish as a new scientific and industrial strength.

This makes product- and production development a critical scientific field for turning technological possibilities into reliable, circular and economically viable industrial realities. Global markets for technology are growing fast, including clean-energy technology, AI in manufacturing, digital twins, circular technologies, and the defence sector. From a global market perspective, velocity is becoming almost as important as technology itself. Growth is not only a matter of developing new technologies, but of transforming them into scalable industrial solutions.

Building a national excellence environment

The CVEx cluster establishes the scientific foundations, methods and technologies needed to accelerate the journey from discovery and prototype to robust products, industrialised processes, resilient supply chains and sustainable lifecycle solutions.

CVEx integrates leading competencies across its four research pillars:

1. Breakthrough technologies for novel production

2. Production science for scaling critical technologies

3. Converging technologies for sustainability, circularity and resilience

4. Human-centred resilience and transformation capability

Overview of the four CVEx research pillars: breakthrough technologies for novel production, production science for scaling critical technologies, converging technologies for sustainability, circularity and resilience, and human-centred resilience and transformation capability. The pillars are connected through a cross-cutting platform for Action Lab and AI for Science Development and Innovation.

CVEx is built on four complementary research pillars that together advance knowledge and solutions for accelerated circular industrial transformation.

Overview of the CVEx research and innovation system. The research pillars are supported by research infrastructure, a research school, and lifelong learning. On the innovation side, teams, innovation infrastructure, and an innovation project portfolio support implementation and growth. The entire initiative is enabled by an ecosystem of universities, research institutes, industry partners, incubators, public actors, and international partners.

CVEx connects research, competence development, and innovation within a national and international ecosystem to accelerate industrial transformation and create impact.

CVEx was initiated by Chalmers in collaboration with KTH and GIH, the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences. As a cluster, it is designed as a national and international excellence environment integrating leading competencies from a range of universities in Sweden across its four research pillars. Building on established collaborations, the cluster aims to access complementary expertise, attract talent, benchmark against world-leading research environments, and build the critical mass required for internationally recognised impact.

Contact

Scientific lead and Core team

Professor Ola Isaksson, Product Development, Co-director Area of Advance Production, Chalmers

Core Team

Professor Árni Halldórsson, Supply and Operations Management, Director Area of Advance Production, Chalmers

Professor Magnus Wiktorsson, Production Logistics, Director Excellence in Production Research (XPRES), KTH

Project initiator

Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg

KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

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