ABSTRACT
The general purpose nature of many of the technologies is said to promote recombinant growth both through the reconfiguration of existing production lines, products and services, and the development of entirely new ones. Sweden is a particularly interesting country to study in relation to what Swedish policy makers call smart manufacturing. Its industrial heritage – in particular, its historic strengths in electrical engineering and mobile communications – means that hardware firms can potentially draw on a rich ‘ecosystem’ of high-value manufacturing knowledge, suppliers and collaborators, and a thick labour market of skilled and experienced workers. ‘Industry 4.0’, the ‘Industrial Internet’ and the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ are fuzzy terms with no standardised definitions. Its components can usefully be seen as a ‘technology-product-industry space’; that is, an evolving set of technologies, product/service applications and industry specific. Industry 4.0 producers are knowledge-intensive businesses in which symbolic and physical product and service creation is a central activity.
