Fortune favors the prepared: How SMEs approach business model innovations in Industry 4.0

By J. Müller, Oana Buliga, Kai-Ingo Voigt. Technological forecasting & social change, 2018

1,036 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The article analyzes how Industry 4.0 triggers changes in the business models of manufacturing SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), by conducting a qualitative research with a sample of 68 German SMEs from three industries (automotive suppliers, mechanical and plant engineering, as well as electrical engineering and ICT). As SMEs play an essential role in industrial value creation, the article examines significant, yet at present understudied implications of Industry 4.0 along industrial value chains. First, the results show that Industry 4.0 encompasses three dimensions, namely high-grade digitization of processes, smart manufacturing, and inter-company connectivity. Second, the article shows how Industry 4.0 affects the three business model elements of manufacturing SMEs – value creation, value capture, and value offer – by giving specific examples for business model innovation in each of the three elements. Third, it shows that both the role as a user and/or provider of Industry 4.0 and whether a company is internally motivated and/or externally pressured towards implementation have an impact on which business model elements are innovated. Fourth, the study delineates four SME categories, designed to help managers to evaluate their own company's positioning towards Industry 4.0: craft manufacturers, preliminary stage planners, Industry 4.0 users, and full-scale adopters.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management of Technology and Innovation, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8691ba021888a3a5a844065d51b8405703d0e98

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Citations in the corpus

Development of a Risk Framework for Industry 4.0 in the Context of Sustainability for Established Manufacturers (2019, background): “[7,17,20,48,68] Infrastructure (9) Broadband internet (8) Mobile network (1) “Suddenly, you realize that there is just a 10 Mbit line available in Berlin.”
Influences of the Industry 4.0 Revolution on the Human Capital Development and Consumer Behavior: A Systematic Review (2020, background): “In contrast, Chinese SMEs primarily see social benefits of this process [111].”
Industry 4.0: A Bibliometric Review of Its Managerial Intellectual Structure and Potential Evolution in the Service Industries (2019, methodology): “Moreover, some studies emphasize the sustainability aspects of the implementation of the industry 4.0 ecosystem (Kiel et al., 2017b; Müller et al., 2018b; Yang et al., 2017)—this topic overlaps between community 1 and 2 and, apparently, links them together.”
Problems with the Implementation of Industry 4.0 in Enterprises from the SME Sector (2019, background): “The generational change resulting from the natural state of affairs results in the appearance of employees with new competences and skills in the market, while, simultaneously, such abilities are often ahead of the adaptation possibilities of the technological infrastructure of the SME sector [7,31,”
Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks and Internet of Things Frameworks in the Industry Revolution 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review (2022, background): “The real-time decision-making capability of each small and medium organization enables them to efﬁciently accept new technologies [60,61].”