A Pragmatist’s Guide to Understanding Industrie 4.0

Will Industrie 4.0, the German-government-backed framework for rebooting the manufacturing sector, lead to a new industrial revolution? And if so, would it be the fourth such revolution, or the third? Or does Industrie 4.0 herald something more like an incremental but substantial software upgrade, as its software-derived name also suggests?

This report takes a look at those questions. We also:

• Put Industrie 4.0 into perspective by exploring the historical context of earlier industrial revolutions.
• Objectively analyze the promise of Industrie 4.0 to prompt an industrial revolution through a combination of theory and technology.
• Consider the so-called “productivity paradox,” which asserts that, despite a wave of recent technological breakthroughs and a growing number of companies successfully deploying the, many measures of productivity are essentially flat.
• Provide an overview on the German origins of “Industrie 4.0” while explaining how the framework relates to industrial IoT.
• Discuss how “Industry 4.0,” the anglicized cousin of the German variant of the term, has become an internationally recognizable concept, while the German organization Plattform Industrie 4.0 has become increasingly collaborative with organizations such as the Industrial Internet Consortium.

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