What’s wrong with Industrie 4.0?

Short answer

A lot. The overly narrow focus on a particular domain of innovation starves the support for innovation is other domains, making Germany lose out in those domains.

This has been bugging me for some time now.

Longer answer

Somehow German politics declared “Industrie 4.0” (industry 4.0) to be a major area of innovation for Germany. Focus, attention, and funding followed. Industrie 4.0 is supposed to be the next evolutionary step in industrial production based on the convergence of the various technology streams we are currently witnessing (software, biotech, hightech, what have you).

As a colleague said: “I have a lot of projects in the 4.0 domain” suggesting, somewhat humorously, that this artificial concept is a research and development domain of its own (rather than a continuation of new and old domains).

This focus comes to the detriment of other domains of innovation. Where is the support for makers, fintech and others? If there is support, it pales in comparison with the funds being channeled into “the 4.0 domain”.

If you want focus and if you want a label for that, it should be much bigger. For example, Internet of Things easily subsumes Industrie 4.0 and would be both broader and more relevant. But that may not have played well to the interests of established German industries. Too bad only that the future isn’t necessarily where the past was.

Fortunately, public funding isn’t everything. Smart entrepreneurs will know where to head to (and when to run for the hills). As such, public funding doesn’t matter as much. Still, smarter signals for domains unchartered rather than incremental would be better.

Posted on

Comments

  1. Kaloyan Dimitrov Avatar

    Hello Dirk,
    I agree with you. A lot of money is being spent just to innovate, but whether it is practical or the right moment to create such product/technology is taken into account. The result is that a lot of money are invested in development of products that has no real value at the moment, or even never

  2. […] rant on what’s wrong with Indus­trie 4.0 argued that it focuses too nar­rowly on too incre­men­tal a […]

Leave a Reply to Kaloyan DimitrovCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Share the Joy

Share on LinkedIn

Share by email

Share on Twitter / X

Share on WhatsApp

Featured Startups

QDAcity makes qualitative research and qualitative data analysis fun and easy.
EDITIVE makes inter- and intra-company document collaboration more effective.

Featured Projects

Making free and open data easy, safe, and reliable to use
Bringing business intelligence to engineering management
Making open source in products easy, safe, and fun to use