Megatrends such as industry 4.0 have a massive impact on strategic and operational issues related to leadership and work. Organizations are challenged to address the challenges of digital transformation through business models, technology and, above all, know-how. Employees are confronted with increasing qualification requirements as a result of Industry 4.0. This does not only apply to professional qualifications, i.e. those skills which are necessary for the exercise of the profession and which change as a result of automation and digitisation. Far-reaching changes can also be expected in the social and media skills environment. Once new knowledge has been acquired, the question of its structuring, storage, accessibility and retrievability arises in the business context. Because optimally not only the participants profit from training measures themselves, but also their colleagues. The objective of Knowledge Management (KM) must be to achieve this. The organization of the emergence, collection and distribution of knowledge plays a central role in Industry 4.0. The highly dynamic nature of industry 4.0 raises a wide range of questions. Some examples that I think are important: a) How can KM be made more agile than in the past? b) What is the role of leadership, autonomy and trust if qualified and motivated knowledge workers play a central role for the success of industry 4.0? c) How can a more internally oriented KM be opened towards open innovation? d) And quite operatively: How can context-related data be linked with empirical knowledge - and how is the knowledge worker put in a position to use this information basis?

Any new technology or the upgraded technology fits into Industry 4.0 for newer generation of manufacturing, so is the concept of knowledge management. Knowledge management has got a new role in industry 4.0.

Any knowledge that was required in previous industry revolution, now needs to be upgraded, whether its Iot, IIot, big data analytics, AI or machine learning and hence knowledge management is needed for newer technology, processes etc. They are very much intertwined with each other.

There are two interesting studies covering this topic, that can be found on Google (Scholar)/Researchgate:

1. Perception Gaps in International Corporate Entrepreneurship: The Role of Knowledge Transfer Tools, where a case study has been introduced.

2. Industry 4.0 – An Introduction in the phenomenon, where knowledge is introduced as a part of the information layer in the indsutry 4.0 concept. Lots of literature on RAMI 4.0 is actually in german.

They are, actually. Through their emphasis on "knowledge". The main difference is that it's no longer "managed", but rather "negotiated" and "co-created". "Management" is a Fordist terminology, more suited for IR 1 & 2.

In Airbus(aircraft manufacturing company), every engineer submits a method report for each work they done, explaining how the achievement was made, which is then submitted to the COC (capability center) for summary. In this way, everyone's work is based on the predecessors' , to complete the overall work. The departure of the man does not affect the operation of the project as a whole, and others have a rough idea of what his part is. These key knowledge are integrated into a variety of application systems, which are repeatedly used in major projects and product development. The depth of enterprise knowledge effectively supports a large number of project management work. The role of knowledge management in industry 4.0 is obvious, isn't it?

Hi Ahmad,

Recently, prof Eric Tsui shared the following message on LinkedIn. You may wish to look into it.

Meliha