Headline:

To take stock of industry’s real-world experience with digitalization to date and the expectations that exist with regard to sustainability impacts, the research group “Digitalisation and Sustainability Transformations” conducted an international study in China, Brazil, and Germany. Their results clearly show that the moderate gains made thanks to digitalization lag far behind the high hopes that many hold for it.

The digital transformation is in full swing, touching economies around the world. This far-reaching transformation is distinguished by three change processes affecting value creation models, information flows and resource flows – the latter two will be examined more closely in this post.

The term Industry 4.0 has been bandied about increasingly since it was established in 2011. Also referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 describes the growing use of digital technologies to link manufacturing technologies and facilitate continuous real-time data exchange. These manufacturing systems are based on interconnected cyber-physical systems with the capacity to independently organize and optimize their performance. Industry 4.0 promises to fundamentally transform manufacturing industry.

Can you be an engineer and ‘still’ ponder the big questions of humanity? This question presented itself to me last year, when I was looking to take a new direction in my career after a number of years in classical engineering jobs. So, there’s no Nobel Prize or Fields Medal for engineering? Oh well. But isn’t it paradoxical that almost everybody in the Western Hemisphere relies on the products of engineering (e.g.