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Image: Getty Images / thitivong
Industries are becoming increasingly interconnected through infrastructure, energy systems, supply chains and investment decisions.
Greater cross-industry coordination during the energy transition can strengthen industrial competitiveness, improve affordability, enhance energy security and system resilience, and accelerate decarbonization.
Six sector-agnostic enablers can help organizations across industries scale the transition in a more pragmatic and resilient way.
Industrial systems are evolving into interconnected ecosystems. In this process, sectors including energy, chemicals, metals, transport, logistics and infrastructure are becoming tightly coupled through shared supply chains, physical networks and coordinated investment decisions.
Yet when these ecosystems are planned in isolation, fragmentation and inefficiency often follow. A lack of coordination across sectors makes it harder to optimize resource flows, scale clean technologies and accelerate the energy transition.
This matters because demand for energy, materials and transport continues to rise while supply chains remain fragile and infrastructure is under strain. At the same time, geopolitical fragmentation and shifting trade, industrial and climate policies are making long-term planning across interconnected industrial value chains increasingly complex.
"The energy transition is strongest when supply, demand and infrastructure advance in a coordinated way," said Tobias Meyer, CEO of Deutsche Post DHL Group. "Policy frameworks are essential for long-term investment and are also critical to ensuring that sustainable solutions remain competitive globally. The world needs systems that put a price on CO2 emissions and make that price economically meaningful."
Better coordination on these critical issues can strengthen competitiveness, lower costs, enhance energy security and system resilience, and advance industrial decarbonization.
The Limits of Industrial Transformation
Image: World Economic Forum, Energy Transition Index 2026
Energy systems sit at the heart of today's industrial landscape, connecting supply chains, infrastructure and industrial value chains. As interdependence across sectors deepens, the energy transition can no longer be pursued in isolation. Cross-industry collaboration is essential.
This interdependence calls for a more integrated, collaborative way of working, with decisions coordinated across industries, infrastructure and supply chains to accelerate the transition and create value for all parties. That requires ecosystem-based models of collaboration.
To support more effective cross-industry collaboration on industrial transformation, the World Economic Forum convened a series of dialogues in 2025 across the energy, chemicals, metals, transport and infrastructure sectors. The discussions centered on the energy ecosystem and examined it from both supply- and demand-side perspectives.
Participants identified six sector-agnostic enablers, set out in the Industry Ecosystem Briefing. These are critical to scaling the transition in a pragmatic and resilient way:
1. Promote Technology Neutrality and Energy Diversity
A resilient, affordable and sustainable industrial system depends on a diverse mix of technologies and energy sources.
As technology and the geopolitical landscape evolve, industries need to explore different combinations of energy sources and technology options to strengthen competitiveness, enhance energy security and advance decarbonization. These options may include conventional fuels, clean hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), carbon management technologies and electrification.
Keeping technology options open gives industries multiple transition pathways, allowing companies to adapt as market conditions, infrastructure constraints and investment realities change.
2. Improve the Affordability of Low-Carbon Products
Technology diversity alone will not determine whether the transition succeeds. The ability of low-carbon solutions to scale ultimately depends on whether they are affordable and accessible across the industrial value chain.
However, a significant cost gap remains between conventional and low-carbon products, particularly in industries with thin margins and rising energy costs. For example, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) typically costs more than conventional jet fuel, although the size of the gap varies by region and market conditions. Similar green-premium challenges exist across the chemical industry value chain.
As a result, many low-carbon technologies require substantial upfront investment before they can achieve economies of scale and bring costs down. Without targeted incentives, shared infrastructure and clearer long-term demand signals, industrial transformation will struggle to move from pilot projects to large-scale deployment.
3. Build Balanced, Inclusive and Regionally Tailored Industrial Transition Pathways
Even where technologies are mature and the investment environment has improved, industrial transformation will not follow a single global model. Regions differ significantly in infrastructure maturity, energy systems, industrial capabilities and access to finance. Tailoring pathways to regional conditions is therefore essential to long-term industrial transformation.
These differences are also evident in investment patterns. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), although emerging economies excluding China are expected to play an important role in future energy demand growth, they received less than 10% of the increase in global clean energy investment between 2015 and 2024.
Transition strategies that ignore regional realities risk creating new fragmentation rather than strengthening system resilience. A solution that works in one region may not be suited to a different economic and industrial context.
Image: World Economic Forum, Energy Transition Index 2026
4. Establish Stable and Consistent Policy Frameworks
Industrial transformation depends on investment cycles that can span decades. Yet companies are increasingly being asked to make long-term investment decisions in a rapidly changing policy environment. According to analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this uncertainty can dampen investment and raise financing costs.
Claudio Descalzi, CEO of ENI, said: "Industrial transformation requires large-scale investment in new technologies, infrastructure and capability building. Long-term, technology-neutral policies can unlock capital, strengthen competitiveness and foster innovation across value chains and energy ecosystems, enabling energy security, system resilience and sustainable growth across sectors."
5. Create More Effective Market Mechanisms for Decarbonization
Stable policy frameworks create the conditions for effective market mechanisms that can accelerate the adoption of low-carbon solutions and foster collaboration across the value chain.
However, decarbonizing one part of a value chain while ignoring the rest may simply shift emissions and costs rather than deliver genuine reductions. Conrad Keijzer, CEO of Clariant AG, said: "Decarbonizing an entire value chain is almost impossible for any single industry participant to achieve alone." He added that collaboration is therefore "essential" in sectors such as chemicals.
With supportive policy frameworks, more coordinated market mechanisms can improve transparency around product carbon intensity, align incentives across the value chain and support shared infrastructure. This would enable industries to invest together and scale collectively, rather than pursuing the transition in isolation.
6. Transform Energy Infrastructure
All of these efforts ultimately depend on reliable, multi-energy infrastructure.
Infrastructure such as ports, power grids, pipelines and logistics networks forms the backbone of industrial transformation, but much of it was originally designed around traditional energy systems and supply chain models.
As industries adopt alternative fuels, low-carbon feedstocks and new technologies, infrastructure must evolve in parallel. Without coordinated public- and private-sector investment, even ambitious transition strategies will struggle to move beyond scattered demonstration projects to large-scale deployment.
Governments therefore play a critical role in planning, permitting and investing in the energy infrastructure needed to support industrial transformation at scale.
Industrial Transformation: From Fragmentation to Collaboration
These six enablers reflect a deeper shift in how organizations pursue industrial transformation. Success increasingly depends on whether industries, governments and infrastructure providers can coordinate around interconnected value chains.
This article is compiled based on publicly available information from the World Economic Forum (WEF). Images and related materials are sourced from the organization's official website. Should there be any concerns regarding copyright or accuracy, please contact us for correction or removal.
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