The Influence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the Entrepreneur Leadership Attributes

Abstract

Innovation, and especially innovation leadership, is a critical factor in enhancing a firm’s success in today’s changing markets. This research investigates changes in the entrepreneurial leadership attributes amid the fourth industrial revolution and how these changes relate to the fast pace of technology advancement. As part of the fourth industrial revolution, the barrier to introducing innovative technology has decreased due to the accessibility of high-end commercial capabilities, such as cloud computing, big-data capacities, open-source codes, and more, which reduce their need for in-house development. This research taps into the current academic knowledge gap and aims to understand how leadership traits (or attributes) may help fully exploit this significant revolution’s advantages and gain a competitive advantage over rivals. This paper also contributes to the knowledge of innovation study and entrepreneur leadership study. The research utilizes automated techniques of content analysis of published interviews and entrepreneurs’ biographies from recent years and the distant past. The results reveal that current entrepreneurs tend to be open-minded while avoiding rejecting innovation from other firms (avoiding “the not invented here” concept) and are willing to share the experience with the adjacent technology eco-system. The main conclusion of the research is that the entrepreneur in the current era should utilize the open innovation eco-system and gather the ingredients for innovation initiatives, and also have the ability to accurately seek the best offthe- shelf solution to use and integrate it while avoiding time- and budget-consuming development procedures.