Wealth is no longer measured by what is owned but by what is sustained over time. A silent revolution is underway, transforming usage into a new source of economic power. In this context, Maintenance 5.0 embodies the beating heart of a regenerative form of industrial sovereignty. It reveals how durability reshapes power, value, and the productive future.
The functional economy is now emerging as one of the most profound transformations of contemporary capitalism. It shifts value away from material ownership and recenters it on usage, durability, and performance. Behind this seemingly technical shift lies a deep metamorphosis of economic culture that redefines the relationship between wealth, productivity, and work. This new model no longer seeks to promote the material acquisition of production assets. It values their usage and promotes their maintenance, longevity, and optimization. It turns operational continuity into a driver of prosperity and sobriety into a condition of power. This economy was born from the internal contradictions of industrial capitalism. Inherited from the industrial revolution, productivism logic associated technical progress with growth and material accumulation. The functional economy does not reject these principles but transforms their purpose. It preserves efficiency while directing it toward continuous improvement and control of material and energy flows. It is grounded in the idea that a firm can create value by reducing consumption, extending product lifetimes, and measuring performance in use. Researchers such as Franck Aggeri and Kate Raworth take this reasoning further and describe this shift as the emergence of a regenerative form of capitalism that no longer feeds on extraction but on preservation and cooperation.
Value no longer arises from accumulation but from the capacity to sustain, evolve, preserve, and optimize what already exists.
The history of usage value is rooted in classical economic thought, just as much as current productivism. Adam Smith identified the division of labor as the source of productivity and argued that value is derived from the labor required for production. David Ricardo deepened this view by introducing the notion of socially necessary labor time, enabling comparisons of value across sectors. Karl Marx transformed this analysis into a critique of the system by distinguishing usage value, linked to the concrete utility of a good, from exchange value, grounded in the abstract logic of capital. This shift opened the way to a dialectical understanding of value that could no longer be separated from the social and material conditions of its production. Later, John Maynard Keynes showed that demand constituted the true engine of economic activity, while Thorstein Veblen theorized forms of consumption often disconnected from real material utility. After the Second World War, the logic of the consumer society turned this framework into a quasi-natural principle embedded in the dominant economic model. Ownership took precedence over satisfaction, and repeated purchasing became the measure of progress and national wealth. In this model, transaction prevailed over usage, and material growth over durability.
Historically, ownership displaced use, and transactions came to define progress far more than the real satisfaction of needs.
The energy crises of the nineteen seventies and the publication of the Club of Rome report revealed the physical limits of this trajectory. The economist Nicholas Georgescu Roegen introduced the concept of entropy into economic thought. Every activity, he argued, transforms ordered resources into dissipated matter, making infinite growth impossible. Herman Daly extended this reasoning by envisioning a steady-state economy in which prosperity would derive from quality rather than quantity. Walter Stahel then shaped an economy of performance in which the producer retains ownership of goods and charges for their use. This idea anticipated the contemporary circular economy, in which maintenance and repairability become levers of competitiveness. Amory and Hunter Lovins complemented this vision by demonstrating that global wealth could be doubled while halving resource consumption through efficiency oriented engineering. In Europe, the book The functional economy, a new path toward sustainable development represented the first coherent attempt to translate these ideas into action. The functional economy is described there as a complete reconfiguration of the role of the firm and its relationship to territory. In this model, value no longer results from the simple production of goods but from the design of integrated solutions combining products, services, and contractually defined usage relationships. This approach requires a decoupling between economic growth and material resource consumption. It ties economic performance to the intrinsic performance of material assets.
Prosperity gradually ceases to be indexed to extraction and becomes increasingly grounded in usage performance and the sustainable mastery of resources.
Today, numerous industrial examples testify to this evolution. At Michelin, the Tire-as-a-Service program has transformed tire sales into a mobility service. The company now charges per kilometer traveled, ensures maintenance and recycling, and guarantees service continuity while reducing waste. Xerox adopted a similar logic by charging for copies rather than machines, integrating maintenance, consumables, and device recovery into its contracts. Rolls-Royce offers airlines guaranteed flight hours rather than engine sales, ensuring maintenance, monitoring, and remote repair. Schneider Electric develops energy management solutions sold as services, combining software, connected sensors, and predictive maintenance. Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, markets light as a service, guaranteeing levels of luminous performance and energy efficiency rather than selling bulbs. Even the automotive sector experimented with this approach through the Care by Volvo program, which offered a subscription including vehicle, maintenance, insurance, and assistance, before being suspended due to resistance from dealership networks.
Tomorrow, industry will no longer sell objects but will orchestrate continuous uses in which durability and performance replace ownership.
These initiatives are not merely marketing innovations. They signal a paradigm shift in which value rests on service continuity, reliability, and reduced material consumption. Maintenance becomes a strategic function, and failure turns into a source of collective learning within a framework of continuous improvement. This approach foreshadows the spirit of Maintenance 5.0, which conceives the human machine relationship as a space of shared intelligence serving sustainable performance. By relocating value around use, the functional economy also strengthens territorial sovereignty. It reduces dependence on global supply chains and fosters the creation of local ecosystems in which design, maintenance, and reuse are articulated through proximity. On the technological level, it values mastery of infrastructures and data, transforming each firm into a guardian of its own knowledge. On the energy level, it promotes sobriety, efficiency, and short circuits. This model thus outlines the contours of a regenerative industrial vision grounded in the capacity of a territory to maintain its resources without exhausting them.
The value proposition shifts toward usage and makes maintenance a strategic foundation of the regenerative industry of the future.
Work itself changes in nature within this context. It is no longer confined to fabrication but encompasses design, maintenance, coordination, and service relationships. The technician becomes a central actor of continuity and reliability. This role requires mastery of data, understanding of complex systems, and anticipation of failures. Design evolves accordingly, integrating repairability and durability from the outset. Experiential knowledge, long marginalized, regains decisive centrality. Maintenance 5.0 exemplifies this evolution by placing humans at the heart of learning loops. Work becomes an activity of interpretation, an art of sustaining, a constant effort to extend the life of technical systems. From a financial perspective, this shift requires new investment instruments. Long-term performance contracts and subscriptions demand new ways of assessing profitability. Green bonds, impact funds, and the European green taxonomy sketch partial responses, yet institutional recognition of usage value remains incomplete. Accounting standards, taxation, and property law must evolve to support this logic of shared usage and extended responsibility.
Individual labor ceases to be a mere factor in production and becomes a strategic support for sustaining, anticipating, and perpetuating industrial systems.
Ultimately, usage value opens the path toward sustainable economic sovereignty. It rests on the ability to maintain, repair, and extend rather than replace. It rehabilitates maintenance not as a cost but as a form of collective intelligence. It restores to work its primary function, that of keeping the world in working order. It reconciles economy, technology, and humanity around a single project, that of a prosperity that does not wear out.
Mustapha Derras
