The path towards Society 5.0 of Colombian Companies

One of the main trends of companies today is to articulate the advances of physical and virtual technologies, which significantly impact on the efficiency of their processes, following the guidelines and proposals of Industry 4.0. However, this concept does not consider such important aspects as the ethical impact by the companies, the construction of a sustainable and responsible environment or the role of people in the organization. That is why different authors began to develop the concept of Society 5.0, aimed to establish a model where the person is the main factor in the innovation development. Innovation in Society 5.0 can be studied through Design Thinking, proposed as a key to solving the wicked problem of Industry 4.0, by connecting innovation and technological policies within the corporate strategies, thus creating a balanced ecosystem. In Colombia, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the country’s economy: they repre-sent 98% of the entrepreneurial environment. Actually, most businesses focus their processes only on increasing profitability. In this work, we explored the path towards Innovation 5.0 from the point of view of a Society 5.0 in Colombian SMEs. We collected data, quantitative and qualitative information from companies belonging to the business development program of Comfamiliar Risaralda (Colombia) to iden-tify if and how they orient their processes according to a Society 5.0. The originality of our research lies in applying the Design Thinking principles within the Industry 5.0 perspective, verifying if the Colombian SMEs are taking up the challenge.