Industry 4.0 and its decentralized technologies: organisational economies (and diseconomies) in the new emerging landscape

Abstract Purpose – This paper focuses on the Industry 4.0 decentralized technologies with the aim of highlighting their economic-organisational dimensions. In particular, the contribution first presents a deeper understanding of the nature and the dynamic of the economies and diseconomies that arise from the adoption and diffusion of decentralized technologies. Second, it aims to shed light on the increasing tension between the hierarchy-based model of production and self-organising model, which involves the pervasive diffusion of decentralized technologies. Design/methodology/approach – Adopting an economic-organizational perspective, deeply rooted in the related extant literature, an analytically consistent model is developed to simultaneously take into account the following variables: adoption density independent variable) and economies of knowledge integration and organizational diseconomies (the costs of a loss of control and the costs of organizational decoupling and recoupling) as dependent variables. Findings- Decentralized technologies allow access to a large quantity and a wide variety of cognitive slacks that have not been possible until now. In doing so, they are leading the transition towards Industry 4.0 multiplying the (unpredictable) opportunities to innovate (i.e. by exaptation and bricolage). Industry 4.0 is an emerging production paradigm that is characterized – with respect to mass production - by a shift of the relative importance of cognitive slack in comparison with tangible slack. Nevertheless, the unrestrainable diffusion of decentralized technologies is not neutral for organizations. On the one hand, these technologies allow for the integration of economies of knowledge, and on the other hand, they involve organizational diseconomies that should not be ignored by managers and researchers. Originality/value- This paper fills a gap in the literature by developing a consistent analytical framework that simultaneously takes into account the economies of knowledge integration (opportunities bricolage and exaptation) and potential organizational diseconomies (the costs of coordination and the loss of control) that arise from the adoption and diffusion of decentralized technologies.