Industry 4.0

1Industry 4.0: Definition and the Acceleration of Innovations

“An innovation is therefore recognized by what it generates in terms of individual and collective uses, which are all the more numerous and varied because it is important […]. But we can also argue that the characteristic of true innovation is to restructure the real needs of Humanity by opening them to the possible, by definition totally unpredictable” (Ménissier 2011). These sentences obviously situate the concept of Industry 4.0 in the fields of innovation seen as a conjecture in advance of the real practice, likely to generate the relationships of individuals and their societies with the future. But one would have spoken of Industry 4.0, if in 30 years the price of a gigabyte had not been reduced by a factor of 3,000,000! If, in 20 years, we had not multiplied by 100 the number of people or companies connected to the Internet in the world (Quigley 2011; Bregman 2017)…

1.1. General framework

The concept of Industry 4.0 was quickly defined in the Preface to this reflection. Whether it is called “Industry 4.0”, as in Europe, the “Internet of Things” (IoT), as in the United States, or simply “Smart Manufacturing”, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are seriously reshaping modern manufacturing. Indeed, this digitization of manufacturing is likely to transform many of the industry’s production methods: the way in which products are sought to reach a market (design), and the way in which they are designed, ...