COVID-19 as a jump start for industry 4.0?

Motivations and core areas of pandemic-related investments in digital technologies at German firms
Publication date
2023-07-07
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Butollo, Florian
Flemming, Jana
Gerber, Christine
Wandjo, David
Delicat, Nina
Herzog, Lorena
Organisational unit
DOI
URI
Publisher
MDPI
Series or journal
Sci
ISSN
Periodical volume
5
Periodical issue
3
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Keyword
Industry 4.0
Digitalization
Remote work
COVID-19
Investment
Abstract
Academic studies prior to the pandemic rather emphasized that the progression towards Industry 4.0 happened in an incremental manner. However, the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic have led to considerable investments that were widely interpreted as a (generalized) digitalization push. However, little is known about the character of such investments and their effects. The goal of this contribution is to provide an empirically based overview of recent investment in digital technologies in six economic sectors of the German economy: mechanical engineering, chemicals, automotives, logistics, healthcare, and financial services. Based on 36 case studies and a survey at 540 companies, we investigate the following questions: 1. How much did the COVID-19 pandemic reduce existing obstacles for investments in digitalization measures? 2. Is there a universal digitalization push due to the COVID-19 pandemic that differs from the trajectory before the pandemic? The results show that the pandemic affected investment in an unequal manner. It was driven by the immediate need to sustain business operations through the virtualization of communication among employees and with external partners. However, there was less dynamism in shop-floor-related digitalization, as it was less related to epidemiological concerns and is more long-term in nature.
Description
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Published version
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