From single products to systems-of-systems

Delivering meaningful sustainability starts with having a holistic understanding of our world and our actions within it. Previously, I talked about how these challenges occur horizontally, across supply chains and product lifecycles. In my last article, I then explored how these challenges manifest vertically, from molecular science to manufacturing.

Let’s take that even further and look at how having a systemic analysis enables sustainable innovation beyond the lab, at the levels of enterprises and complex networks – and even whole cities!

Take plastic as an example. Today, over 90% of plastic isn’t recycled. Instead, the vast majority is incinerated, causing air pollution, or dumped, ending up in our oceans or environments, which has disastrous implications for our planet and our health. Breakdowns or inefficiencies in our recycling systems have a huge knock-on effect on our ecosystems.

It is essential, then, that we understand these networks holistically. We need to think of cause and effect at a system scale; not a linear one.

Making the leap from concept to execution

Cultivated meat is one of the most exciting sustainability innovations of recent years. In its 2022 Climate Change mitigation report, the @IPCC highlighted the potential of meat alternatives to “bring substantial reduction in direct GHG emissions from food production". 

But note that word, ‘potential’. While lab-grown meat is incredibly exciting in theory, things are thornier in practice. For example, one study from 2023 found that, when you look at full lifecycle impacts – in this case, the cost of equipment and chemical processing inputs – lab-grown meat emissions could be 25x higher than current farming methods.

Of course, it is rare to perfect a process on the first attempt. And this doesn’t make the concept of lab-grown meat any less intriguing; if anything, it makes us determined to find new and better ways to implement these innovations.

Implementation is precisely where I know digital technology can have immense power, helping us anticipate enterprise-level challenges, align on effective scaling strategies, and deploy those strategies in practice.

Take another important sustainability sector: electric vehicles (EVs). EVs are an increasingly familiar sight on streets around the world. But to achieve mass adoption, EVs must clear some pretty significant hurdles, not least price – in one recent survey, more than half of EU customers said that EVs were still too expensive.

Digital solutions can help identify and address the factors driving up these costs. In Asia, for example, Chinese carmaker Neta Auto used virtual twin technology to standardize its production processes, helping it rapidly scale up manufacturing and support its goal of delivering affordable mass-market EVs to a global marketplace.

These enterprise-level optimizations, though, are just one piece of the EV-scaling puzzle. I explored the challenges facing battery innovators in a previous article, but product innovation and sophisticated manufacturing means nothing if cities themselves are not ready to accommodate electric vehicles.

Simulating cities for systemic sustainability

Preparing the world for EVs means developing stronger regulatory frameworks. It means widespread installation of charging infrastructure. It means understanding how EVs will interact with existing urban transportation systems. It means raising awareness in citizens and potential consumers. In other words, it’s a true system-of-systems challenge.

This is not a challenge that can be solved by a single organization, but one which requires the coordination of everyone from private manufacturers to public regulators, from individual consumers to power grid operators – all of whom may be operating on different time horizons, and with often contradictory demands and goals.

Consortiums like Software République (of which DassaultSystems is a member) are one way the industry is responding, harmonizing stakeholders around a common goal. As my colleague @TomAcland, puts it: “[EV innovators] cannot just stay in the traditional Auto vertical; we need to collaborate with cities, with energy companies, with software players.” Digital solutions can be essential to facilitating conversations and collaboration between these players.

A similar systemic challenge modern cities increasingly face is the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. UHIs are urbanized areas that have become significantly hotter than their surroundings. Sadly, it’s not something that can simply be addressed by just turning on the aircon – in fact, the waste heat generated by AC units contributes to the UHI effect!

There are an array of factors—from the asphalt on our roads to the glass on our buildings—that combine in complex ways to drive up temperatures. With so many variables, just understanding the nature of the problem is difficult. And when timelines and city budgets are finite, how can we ensure we’re pursuing the most effective solutions?

This is a situation where trial-and-error won’t cut it. The 2022 European heatwave was estimated to have caused up to 70,000 excess deaths, and according to the Copernicus ECMWF report, summer 2024 was the hottest on record globally. We have to get this right-first-time.

This is exactly where I believe the virtual world excels – allowing us to not only analyze UHIs, but also identify, test, and deploy the right solutions. Say you learn that facing buildings with different materials could reduce heat: generative design capabilities can then help evaluate not only the thermal performance of proposed façades, but also how they could be installed in a practical, cost-effective and timely way.

Reflecting on the multi-scalar world

There is nothing sustainable about a city regularly reaching over 50ºC – its repercussions are inescapable. We must find solutions that mitigate the impacts of these high temperatures, whether it’s on infrastructure, economy or public health. That is the core objective of sustainability.  

It’s not about better initiatives, or smarter technology. It’s about keeping the future safe. Our question shouldn’t be, “does this hit my ESG targets?” but: “does this make our world more livable?”  

Previously, that question was too big for most of us to answer, requiring the integration of hugely divergent domains of information and expertise. But digital solutions – from modelling and simulation tools to entire virtual twins – have changed this equation, helping us understand our decisions not just in their immediate context, but how their consequences can unfold in a multidimensional matrix of cause-and-effect.

The real world doesn’t fit into neat boxes. It operates as a complex system-of-systems at all scales. It is everything, everywhere, and all at once. We must learn to do the same, if we are to build a truly sustainable future.