Organizing the Enterprise 4.0. Multi-faced insights from a review of the Industry 4.0

Despite its popularity, the Industry 4.0 phenomenon is still foggy and its understanding is mostly limited to the implementation of technological innovation. Nonetheless, in order to become ‘4.0 compliant’, an enterprise must also adapt its organization and business approaches, and these changes may lead to a significant social impact. Therefore, we perform a literature review to investigate the emerging features of the enterprise coming from the Industry 4.0 paradigm. This lead us to identify four different distinctive features. We found that these features, all together, are pushing a shift from Industry 4.0 to the Enterprise 4.0: a supposed smarter enterprise characterised by informed middlemen and resilient workers, as well as business models that are customer and service centred, integrated and networked, and sustainable. Further, this enterprise is self-organised and lean, with open organisational cultures and structures, along with participative and agile management styles and its employees are trained through new technology-related and laboratory-based educational paths. We conclude by drawing few implications for organizational design.