ABSTRACT
Digitalization and digitization have increasingly penetrated all facets of life since governments started laying broadband cables on a large scale in the 1990s. The digital infrastructure gave rise to the birth of autonomous unmanned instruments that operated through the transfer of artificial intelligence. Consequently, instruments, farms, firms, organizations, and localities began experiencing smartification. This chapter presents a brief history of the transition from Industry 3.0 to Industry 4.0, and subsequently problematizes the critical issues related to these developments with a focus on the embedding ecosystem to stimulate the promotion of IR4.0 technologies in Malaysia. In doing so, this introduction focuses on the ecosystem embedding economic activities of agriculture, manufacturing, and services, and the intermediary organizations essential to address collective action problems with an emphasis on a consulting company entrusted with promoting government initiatives to stimulate the diffusion of IR4.0 technologies in Malaysia, and cybersecurity initiatives by the cybersecurity council to shield these developments from cyber-attacks.
