WORKSHOP on Emerging landscapes. New jobs, new skills, new technologies and new organizational challenges in the Industry 4.0 revolution

The concept of digitizing everything is already a reality. Automation, artificial intelligence, IoT, machine learning and other advanced technologies are capturing and analyzing a wealth of data that gives us sizable amount and types of information to work from. One of the major challenges we face is to change the way we think, train and work with data in order to create value through advanced technologies. The term Industry 4.0 was first introduced in 2011 during the Hannover Fair, as a project in high-tech German Industry. The German Working Group on Industry 4.0 was created in the following year. The group delivered its final report in April 2013 again at the Hannover Fair. In this report the Industry 4.0 was defined as an environment characterized by the strong customization of products and by manufacturing ecosystems with autonomic self-properties, such as self-configuration, self-monitoring, and self-healing. Thus, the term was definitely adopted at the 2015 World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting held in January 2015 in Davos (Switzerland) to indicate the rise of a new industrial revolution: the fourth. This revolution is occurring where countless elements comprising industrial systems and services are being interfaced with internet communication technologies to form the smart future factories and manufacturing organizations. Industry 4.0 and its associated key technologies (cloud-based design, Mobile Devices, Big Data, smart manufacturing systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), 3D printing) are currently being driven by disruptive innovation that promises to bring countless new value creation opportunities across all major market sectors. Its vision of ecosystems of smart factories with intelligent and autonomous shop-floor entities is inherently decentralized. This, in turn, entails new complexities within platforms, metaplatforms and socio-technological ecosystems, constantly creating new challenges and opportunities (i.e. responding to customer demands for tailored products and/or creating new products for new customers) for technology enablers, users and users/enablers. Industry 4.0 seems to dictate the end of consolidated models (mental, educational, managerial, organizational, cultural, social etc.) and, at the same time, it asks for new “lenses” and interpretative paradigms enabling old and new actors to succeed in such magmatic landscape. Despite the significant hype around the topic, there is extant research regarding the exact consequences for people, companies and institutions involved. For example, millions of workplaces are being vaporized in a rhythm never seen before, while others are emerging towards becoming of billion-dollar companies (i.e. unicorn companies), which are managed by a reduced number of highly skilled professionals. Industry 4.0 environments are made of diverse technologies spread across many disciplines with many different types of subject matter experts. However, there are few standards and processes designed to assist each entity to speak a common language and think systemically. Academics and practitioners are trying to deeply comprehend the consequences of Industry 4.0 revolution for employees, businesses, technology users/enablers and the society at large. This is particularly challenging in the newly emerging socio-technological context where organizational boundaries and the distinction between services and manufacturing are getting fuzzier than ever. The workshop aims to critically analyze the state-of-the-art about the Industry 4.0 context, its pros and cons and its challenges in terms of: • new competitive rules; • new skills, new jobs, new educational programs; • new labor organization and new organizational models; • new technologies; • new paradigms for the value co-creation; • new models of interactions among human beings, machines and virtual world. Under this perspective, atoms and bits interpenetrate more and more like a fluid and virtuosic dance. These key issues will be debated in the workshop as forerunner ideas for future research on this emerging landscape. Keywords: industry 4.0; value-co-creation; industrial revolution; IoT; industrial metaplatform