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Innovation is one of the key drivers of growth, development, and profitability, which increases competitive advantages and has recently been moving towards industry 4.0 technologically. This motivates companies to update their business models (BM) towards industry 4.0. Moreover, there is a technique with the primary characteristics for achieving this motivation called "cross-industry innovation". Cross-industry innovation is a new method of innovation that concerns the creative translation and imitation of existing solutions from other industries for responding to the needs of the current market, sectors, areas, or domains. The challenge is to find out how far managers can rely on that to innovate their BM towards Industry 4.0. The aim of this study was to investigate the application of cross-industry innovation for designing industry 4.0 BM and explore the extent to which companies can rely on it as it has not been used for this purpose previously. This study utilized a database analysis to compare cross-industry innovation practices with industry 4.0 BM's characteristics in terms of value proposition, value creation, and value capture levels. In addition, some interviews were conducted with companies that had previously implemented cross-industry innovation to validate and generalize the results. The results indicated that cross-industry innovation practices can better fulfill flexible and dynamic networks, connected information flows, high efficiency, high scalability, and high availability in terms of value creation as well as variabilization of prices and costs in terms of value capture. Therefore, it demonstrated that cross-industry innovation was a more dependable and applicable strategy for designing the BM of Industry 4.0 than current practices.
Digitalization is changing the industrial landscape in a way we did not anticipate. The manufacturing industries worldwide are working to develop strategies and concepts for what is labelled with different terms such as the Industrial Internet of Things in the USA or Industrie 4.0 in Germany. Many industrialized economies are driven by the production sector and this sector needs specific approaches and instruments to take up other than those approaches we know from start-ups and ventures coming from Silicon Valley and other places. In this paper, we demonstrate an appropriate approach to transform producing companies in a systematic and evolutionary approach.
In particular, the objective of this paper is to provide results from two initiatives which conceptually build upon each other and are of particular relevance for the production industry. First, we present a global survey on the state of implementation and the future perspectives of the concept Industrie 4.0 from 2016. Findings from this study have forced parts of the German industry to heavily invest into a common approach to accelerate change towards Industry 4.0 in order to stay competitive in worldwide economy. This approach is presented in a second part.