Industry 4.0 in Smes Across the Globe: Drivers, Barriers, and Opportunities

The field of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) digitalization is becoming more mature and stands to significantly contribute to the full development of the agenda of Industry 4.0. Although national digitalization programs have their own goals, the common focus is on the role of SMEs in global value chains. Since SMEs are known to have challenges around Industry 4.0 implementation, this book integrates experiences from 14 countries worldwide.

Industry 4.0 in SMEs across the Globe: Drivers, Barriers, and Opportunities provides an in-depth overview of Industry 4.0 in SMEs, covering various national, historical, and geographical settings in nine European countries: Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Serbia, and the UK, complemented by five other countries from around the world: Brazil, China, India, Iran, and the U.S.

Each chapter describes the national digitalization program, along with barriers, drivers, and opportunities to implement Industry 4.0 in local SMEs. It subsumes the findings across these countries to identify common themes and clusters of drivers, barriers, and opportunities. The book concludes that there are common approaches of SMEs across the world to adopt Industry 4.0, which are to be understood to increase industrial competitiveness globally.

This book is a great resource for digitalization leaders and laggards, business consultants and researchers, as well as Ph.D. and master’s students from industrial engineering and manufacturing backgrounds. Policy makers can also use the contents to better understand the commonalities and differences of national digitalization programs and further support SMEs in their digitalization process.

Julian M. Müller is professor at Kufstein University of Applied Sciences, Austria and is visiting professor at Jagellonian University Krakow (Poland) and Corvinius University Budapest (Hungary). He completed his PhD at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). His research interests include Industry 4.0, technology and innovation management, supply chain management, sustainability, small and medium-sized enterprises, and business model innovation.

Nikolai Kazantsev is a research associate at The University of Exeter (UK) and senior lecturer at HSE University (Russia). His PhD the University of Manchester is devoted to barriers to new supply relationships between SMEs in the context of Industry 4.0, collaboration design methods and collaborative business models for SMEs. Nikolay’s research interests are related to the impacts of digital technologies and new collaborative business models to industries, companies and individuals.