Assessing Industry 4.0 readiness: a multi-country industry level analysis

Abstract

Recently digital solutions and novel industrial technologies started to become widespread in manufacturing. There are many different approaches to assess the so called Industry 4.0 transition of national economies (macro) and of individual companies (micro) as well. Our paper elaborates a framework that enables the assessment of Industry 4.0 at sector (meso) level. Relying on the proposed methodology we compare the (evolution of) Industry 4.0 readiness of four manufacturing sectors in EU28. We conclude that the aggregated sector of computer and vehicle manufacturing is the most advanced in I4.0. A deeper analysis of this sector has revealed that countries with top starting performance in the transition in 2014 (SWE, DE, AT) have presented the greatest progress between 2014- 2017. While there are expectations that I4.0 could strengthen the relative importance of manufacturing in terms of value added, we did not find evidence for it.