Special Issue: International Conference on Value Chain Sustainability ICOVACS 2010, Valencia (Spain)

This special issue of the Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management is focused on new trends in sustainable development and corporate social responsibility strategies in the 21st Century Global Market. As it is well known, one of the Millennium Development Goals that United Nations members have agreed to achieve by the year 2015 is to ensure environmental sustainability. This means to meet human needs while preserving the environment so these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come. One way to achieve this goal is to convince private organizations to involve themselves in sustainable supply chains and deep social corporative practices. From the academics' point of view, this topic provides a wide field where industrial engineers, managers, advanced technology experts, sociologists, information systems experts, psychologists, financial experts and so on, can help. Most of the problem related with sustainability needs multidisciplinary approaches from engineering, manufacturing/services, marketing, computers, economics, ethics, etc, and it is necessary to provide synergic solutions based in the previous experience in traditional supply chain problems. This was one of the ideas for starting the International Conference on Value Chain Sustainability series, to bring academic, industry and government personnel from various countries to present and discuss the next frontier for product design, branding and logistics from sustainable and social responsible point of view as a leadership strategy in a global market.