Driving forces and barriers of Industry 4.0: Do multinational and small and medium-sized companies have equal opportunities?

By Dóra Horváth, Roland Zs. Szabó. Technological forecasting & social change, 2019

1,050 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution poses significant challenges to manufacturing companies from the technological, organizational and management points of view. This paper aims to explore how top executives interpret the concept of Industry 4.0, the driving forces for introducing new technologies and the main barriers to Industry 4.0. The authors applied a qualitative case study design involving 26 semi-structured interviews with leading members of firms, including chief digital officers and chief executive officers. Company websites and annual reports were also examined to increase the reliability and validity of the results. The authors found that management desire to increase control and enable real-time performance measurement is a significant driving force behind Industry 4.0, alongside production factors. Organizational resistance at both employee and middle management levels can significantly hinder the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies, though these technologies can also transform management functions. Multinational enterprises have higher driving forces and lower barriers to industry 4.0 than small and medium-sized companies, but these smaller companies have good opportunities, too.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96f3fa43a837c4f919bfb12ac07f2451268819b7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

In Management Information Systems

In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

Digital transformation in business and management research: An overview of the current status quo (2022, background): “Organizations, regardless of their type and size, need to be prepared to align or even replace their current business processes with new ones (Horv ´ ath & Szab ´ o, 2019) which they might not necessarily be comfortable with (Benjamin & Potts, 2018).”
Barriers to the adoption of industry 4.0 technologies in the manufacturing sector: An inter-country comparative perspective (2020, background): “0 remains largely unexplored in the extant literature and merits further investigation (de Sousa Jabbour et al., 2018a, b; Kamble et al., 2018; Horváth and Szabó, 2019; Oesterreich and Teuteberg, 2016; Xu et al., 2018).”
Information and digital technologies of Industry 4.0 and Lean supply chain management: a systematic literature review (2020, background): “0 a sub-concept (Horváth and Szabó 2019).”