Over the last few years, the fourth industrial revolution has attracted more and more attentions all around the world. In the current literature, there is still a lack of efforts to systematically review the state of the art of this new industrial revolution wave. The aim of this study is to address this gap by investigating the academic progresses in Industry 4.0. A systematic literature review was carried out to analyse the academic articles within the Industry 4.0 topic that were published online until the end of June 2016. In this paper, the obtained results from both the general data analysis of included papers (e.g. relevant journals, their subject areas and categories, conferences, keywords) and the specific data analysis corresponding to four research sub-questions are illustrated and discussed. These results not only summarise the current research activities (e.g. main research directions, applied standards, employed software and hardware), but also indicate existing deficiencies and potential re...

Past, present and future of Industry 4.0 - a systematic literature review and research agenda proposal

Entrepreneurial intention is a rapidly evolving field of research. A growing number of studies use entrepreneurial intention as a powerful theoretical framework. However, a substantial part of this research lacks systematization and categorization, and there seems to be a tendency to start anew with every study. Therefore, there is a need to take stock of current knowledge in this field. In this sense, this paper carries out a review of the literature on entrepreneurial intentions. A total of 409 papers addressing entrepreneurial intention, published between 2004 and 2013 (inclusive), have been analyzed. The purpose and contribution of this paper is to offer a clearer picture of the sub-fields in entrepreneurial intention research, by concentrating on two aspects. Firstly, it reviews recent research by means of a citation analysis to categorize the main areas of specialization currently attracting the attention of the academic community. Secondly, a thematic analysis is carried out to identify the specific themes being researched within each category. Despite the large number of publications and their diversity, the present study identifies five main research areas, plus an additional sixth category for a number of new research papers that cannot be easily classified into the five areas. Within those categories, up to twenty-five different themes are recognized. A number of research gaps are singled out within each of these areas of specialization, in order to induce new ways and perspectives in the entrepreneurial intention field of research that may be fruitful in filling these gaps.

A systematic literature review on entrepreneurial intentions: citation, thematic analyses, and research agenda

Sustainable Industry 4.0 framework: A systematic literature review identifying the current trends and future perspectives

This article is focused on the importance and influence of Industry 4.0 and consequently the Internet-connected technologies for the creation of value added for organizations and society. The contribution of the article is mainly conceptual. With the development of the Internet, the Internet of things that is central to the new industrial revolution has led to “Industry 4.0.” The aim of this article is to synthesize the known theory and practices of Industry 4.0, and to investigate the changes that will result from Industry 4.0 and with the development of the Internet of things.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244016653987

A Complex View of Industry 4.0

We have come a long way from the heady days of the Great Society, when most people seemed to believe that education would solve all of our problems, both intellectual and social The Coleman Report in 1966 cast the first doubts, and Jencks ( Inequality ) and Averch ( How Effective is Schooling? ) in 1972 seemed to make it official: nothing that schools do really makes any difference Considering that we spend more on schools than most other state and local governmental functions combined, this is indeed a dreary state of affairs Fifteen Thousand Hours has the temerity to question our present conventional wisdom It is a study of what things do make a difference in pupil outputs in 12 London inner-city secondary schools In many ways, it is a substantial improvement, methodologically, over previous studies First, it studies not just one output (which has usually been the score on some standardized test),

Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children

Purpose : Industry 4.0 represents a special challenge for businesses in general and for SMEs in particular. The study at hand will examine companies´ awareness, readiness and capability to meet this challenge taking into account the special role of SMEs. Methodology: The results of nine studies dealing with this range of topics are examined in the framework of a systematic review and compared with regard to the objective of the study at hand. Findings: The review showed that, as a rule, there is an awareness concerning the relevance of the topic. The readiness and the capability to meet this challenge exist in parts; however, they strongly depend on the enterprise size. The smaller SMEs are, the higher the risk that they will become victims instead of beneficiaries of this revolution. Originality/value : Considering different studies concerning Industry 4.0 the article gives an insight into the dependence of the Industry 4.0 readiness in reference to the company size. This deepens the knowledge in adaption deficits German SME still have and opens different approaches for further research and action plans.

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Industrial revolution - industry 4.0: Are German manufacturing SMEs the first victims of this revolution?

The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has since its development some 20 years ago proved to be a powerful approach to explain human behaviour. It has been successfully applied to a wide range of behaviours. Interestingly, it is in particular complex behaviour such as managerial decision making which saw only a few attempts to use TPB. This is in particular true for company internationalisation. While the main elements of the theory are generally accepted, it has been suggested at many occasions that the model would benefit by the inclusion of more constructs in terms of explanatory quality. Among the elements proposed, Past Behaviour is of particular importance. Although being vividly discussed, researchers did not come to a definitive judgement on whether or not the construct really should be integrated as an independent factor. The paper at hand adresses these issues by developping a framework for an extended TPB which should be relevant in particular for complex behaviours such as International Entrepreneurship. It is based on an extensive literature review which identifies two main lines of research in terms of Past Behaviour. Using a decomposition approach to integrate Past Behaviour, the shortcomings of earlier approaches are avoided. The framework features a second contribution by explicitly modelling information processing modes, which are proposed to influence development of intentions.

The Theory Of Planned Behaviour And The Impact Of Past Behaviour

While International Entrepreneurship has attracted scholars’ attention during the last two decades, the impact cognitive aspects exert has been studied on cursory level only. The purpose of this paper was to apply the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to the very field of International Entrepreneurship in order to examine whether this theory contributes to clarify what influences Small and Medium-sized Enterprises’ (SME) decision-makers’ intention—an important cognitive antecedent to behavior—to play an active part in internationalization. In particular, it had to be clarified whether or not International Entrepreneurship—due to its contextual specificities—deserves to be extended by further elements, i.e. experience and knowledge. Based on more than 100 responses from German SME executives, the study yielded several interesting results. First, TPB indeed helps explain how intentions to actively participate in international business are built. Second, an extension of the theory’s basic model seems to make sense, probably due to the specificities of international entrepreneurial behavior. As for the extensions, direct and moderating effects have been observed. Furthermore, cognitive elements seem to be key entrepreneurial resources which serve as sort of enablers. From these results several conclusions can be drawn. Cognitive aspects are a promising starting point for understanding decision-making in SME. Thus, the intersection of international entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial cognition deserves further attention—several examples for possible future studies are presented. Policies supporting SME should be extended: pure resource-based approaches seem to be insufficient. Furthermore, entrepreneurship courses and curricula should reflect the relevance of cognitive aspects.

Intention as a cognitive antecedent to international entrepreneurship—understanding the moderating roles of knowledge and experience

Studies dealing with the internationality of executive boards of large enterprises show that their internationality as measured by share of foreign sales differs significantly from the internationality of the enterprise activities. This was confirmed by the present survey on medium-sized enterprises from Singapore. Furthermore, it could be noticed that on the one hand that in order to explain exeutive board internationality, the internationality indicator International work experience of the executive board members has a high importance compared to the three other indicators examined, i.e. multinationality expressed as the board members nationality, international education, and international relations. On the other hand this indicator is the only one that has a measurable influence on the internationality of the enterprise activities the latter being measured by the companys share of foreign sales. This lets indicator multi-nationality that is frequently used in literature as a key-indicator of the internationality of an executive board appear to be overrated compared to other indicators generally used in studies on internationality. Thus, future studies in the field should consider its rather limited explanatory value.

/pdf/degree-of-internationalization-a-multidimensional-challenge-2cvmzona9t.pdf

Degree Of Internationalization A Multidimensional Challenge

In recent years, the internationality of enterprises, relying on adequate management resources, has gained in importance. One resource is the "International Experience of the Board" which for lack of primary datavery often can be measured on the basis of secondary data only. The lack of primary data on the one hand and the public interest on the other hand leads to the creation of partly simplified board indices based on more or less random measures / variables or compositionswith limited informative value.The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the need for an improvement of such indices composed of secondary data and to develop a new concept for a board index(“InExWE”).The new indexis basedon the available secondary data, too, and has to be seen as a suboptimalsolution but in contrast to some other indices this indexoffers the advantage ofsubdividing "International Experience" into different subareas and separate weighting factors to improve its informative value. First results of a pilot study indicate an additional informative value.

https://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/ijba/article/download/1469/781

Lutz Sommer

Papers

Industrial revolution - industry 4.0: Are German manufacturing SMEs the first victims of this revolution?

The Theory Of Planned Behaviour And The Impact Of Past Behaviour

Intention as a cognitive antecedent to international entrepreneurship—understanding the moderating roles of knowledge and experience

Degree Of Internationalization A Multidimensional Challenge

The Measurement of International Experience as a Dimension of Board Indices: Concept for an Improvement