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ABSTRACT
Industry 4.0 heralds the profound transformation of business models by enabling the fusion of virtual and real worlds and the application of digitization, automatization and robotics in manufacturing. We review the basic premises of Industry 4.0 and map them against the clusters’ features with the aim to establish the kind of relations between these two categories. By exploring the likely impact of clusters on Industry 4.0, our discussion revolves around the broader question of the role of regional ecosystems in industrial transformation. Clusters, thanks to the advantages such as knowledge base and mechanisms, agglomeration economies and externalities (labour pool and critical mass of firms) and favourable more stable, less uncertain environment of trust and cooperation, may facilitate the digital transformation, particularly its phasing-in and testing phases. Notwithstanding this potential, it should be stressed that not all clusters would be able to play such prominent role. Only these equipped with adequate knowledge base and providing some expertise in the field of IT solutions, robotics, automatics, and so on, i.e. the technologies crucial to Industry 4.0 seem predestined to contribute to the emergence of fully fledged industrial internet. Despite seemingly some inconsistency between these two categories, clusters can facilitate the business transformation towards Industry 4.0.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. [1] Being initiated by the European Commission, it gathers 13 organisations from nine European countries, all well experienced in the field of cluster management and cluster policy.
2. What is very striking is the speed of expansion of the list from 4 through 10, 16, the list of clusters registered as representing Industry 4.0 has been expanding to 38 within a couple of days (16 on 25th February to as many as 38 on 2nd March 2017). Various new initiatives have been added to the cohort under the heading Industry 4.0. (http://www.clusterplattform.de/SiteGlobals/CLUSTER/Forms/Suche/DE/Clustersuche_Formular.html?cl2Categories_TechnologieAnwendungsbereich_name=industrie_40&oneOfTheseWords=Suchbegriff+eingeben).