From Productivity to Generative Capacity: Socio-Technical Systems, Industry X.0 and the Governance of Generativity in the Long Term

The concept of productivity has historically structured the interpretation of technological progress and economic development, acting as a central category in industrial, organizational and policy models. However, in contemporary socio-technical systems, characterized by the intangibility of assets, the distribution of agency, systemic interdependence and long time horizons, productivity exhibits structural limits that undermine its analytical adequacy and its capacity to orient value creation over time. Even in the most recent extensions associated with Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0, it continues to operate as a metric implicitly oriented toward performance optimization, struggling to integrate sustainability, human-centricity and systemic legitimacy in a coherent manner. This paper proposes a radical conceptual rethinking, replacing the notion of productivity with that of generative capacity, understood as the systemic aptitude of a socio-technical ensemble to generate value over time across economic, social, cognitive, institutional and environmental dimensions. Through a theoretical re-reading that integrates contributions from evolutionary economics, systems theory, organizational sciences and social philosophy, the work reinterprets the Industry X.0 paradigms not as a linear succession of industrial revolutions, but as a stratification of coexisting generative logics. The paper also introduces the common good as an intrinsic orientation criterion of generative capacity and proposes the horizon of a generative capacity 6.0, understood not as a new technological phase, but as a meta-systemic threshold of reflexive governance in which value creation is also assessed with respect to its direction, its legitimacy and its long-term sustainability. This yields a theoretical basis for rethinking research, governance and public policies beyond the industrial paradigm of productivity.