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Scientific progress in a field is mostly discussed within disciplines. Far less attention is paid to outside or between disciplines' work. To speed up research progresses for collaborative networks (CN) in manufacturing, a base for further grounded theory establishment is propagated, recalling some of the most relevant chapters of philosophy of science. The focus is put onto the roles of disciplines and their scholars involved in interdisciplinary contexts, in order to further motivate as well as to hint at a number of catalysing forces and fruitful impacts of outside disciplines' work.

The intentions of this Special Issue are mirrored to important and well‐accepted findings in the philosophy of science. All papers that are included in this journal issue are positioned within a general framework of scientific disciplines and theory building understanding.

Interdisciplinary work is speeding up theory building and innovation in CNs in general and in all applications for manufacturing in particular. In order to encourage publications of project work and solutions that do not neatly fit into the scientific disciplines set up, it is pointed out that exactly these papers have the potential to unveil unattended and valuable insights. This kind of outline often confirms both gut feelings of managers, as well as vague hypotheses of researchers and scientists.

The paper shows that more attention might be paid to outside contributions and to mechanisms to increase their impact on theory building in manufacturing science.

For the field of CN, the paper represents a first and unique attempt to enhance scientific progress by emphasising theory contributions from other disciplines. The approach contributes to theoretically as well as methodically supporting the fast growing number of practical solutions beyond state of art.

The paper intends to contribute to interpretations of present and future developments in manufacturing and manufacturing research. It designs hypothetical expert consolidated projections for the future of manufacturing with the focus on social impacts from information and communications technologies (ICT).

In order to obtain valid projections, Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions has been applied to production sciences. Since, the paradigm shift to post mass production has become evident, it is clear that manufacturing will be of network type. Since, the point of a “normal science” (Kuhn) is not yet reached, empirical and methodical work is exploited, especially expert discussion results, technology forecasts and field surveys, to draw the baselines for further developments, focussing on development lines on global, regional as well as company scale.

The paper sketches organisational set ups and ICT applications for future manufacturing in order to be able to point out induced effects on other trends and drivers (especially social and societal). Major changes in role and future behaviour of manufacturing could be verified.

The paper assumes a specific driver/impact constellation, which emphasises socio‐technical relations and focuses on organisation and ICT use in manufacturing environments as decisive and limiting influences. Other socio/technology interrelations are not regarded as intensively and could be future research fields. Implications on the methods and the instruments to be used for production networks could be sketched.

Some of the methodologies may be downscaled and applied for companies in order to define future strategies. On global, on regional as well as on company level, relevant results may be considered as elements of a future networked manufacturing world.

Trends and drivers for future manufacturing have been newly put into network interrelations in order to obtain impact priorities and interaction hypotheses. Ongoing developments are envisioned as embedded in a general paradigm change. The paper draws from extensive research work on the field. It addresses researchers as well as practitioners dealing with manufacturing companies' strategy development.

On modern markets, supply chains (SC) shape the competition landscape. At the same time, considerable research advancements have been recently achieved in the area of collaborative networks. Trends in information technology progress for networked systems include development of cyber‐physical networks, cloud service environments, etc. The purpose of this paper is to identify an inter‐disciplinary perspective and modelling tools for new generation SCs which will be collaborative cyber‐physical networks.

This study addresses the above‐mentioned research goal by first, developing a methodical vision of an inter‐disciplinary modelling framework for SCM based on the existing studies on SC operations, control and systems theories; and second, by integrating elements of different structures with structures dynamics within an adaptive framework based upon the authors' own research.

The inter‐disciplinary modelling framework for multi‐structural SCs has been developed. A new inter‐disciplinary level of model‐based decision‐making support in those SCs is claimed based on the integration of previously isolated problems and modelling tools developed in such disciplines like operations research, control theory, system dynamics, and artificial intelligence.

The novelty of this paper is the consideration of SC modelling in the context of collaborative cyber‐physical systems. This topic is particularly relevant for researchers and practitioners who are interested in future generation SCs. Particular focus is directed towards the multi‐structural SC modelling, structure dynamics, and inter‐disciplinary problems and models in future SCs. Challenges of integrated optimization in the organizational and informational context are discussed.