Technology, Business Models and Competitive Advantage in the Age of Industry 4.0 (Technologia, modele biznesowe i przewaga konkurencyjna w erze Przemyslu 4.0)

Industry 4.0 is a concept which sets out a way of understanding the observed revolutionary changes in the organization of manufacturing processes and their impact on businesses and societies. The scale and scope of changes already underway are seen as so large as to mark the advent of a new industrial age. While technology innovation is widely recognized as a key determinant of firm success in this new age, the role of business models (BMs) and business model innovation (BMI) remains understudied, and therefore potentially underestimated in this setting. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyze how BMs and BMI relate to technology innovation in shaping the competitive advantage of firms in the age of Industry 4.0. As the topic is far too broad for any single empirical analysis, the author’s ambition is to lay theoretical groundwork for future empirical studies. To achieve that, integration and reinterpretation of several separate streams of managerial literature is required, for which interpretative literature review has been selected as the most appropriate research method. The study shows that BMs (and thus BMI) mediate in the commercialization of new technologies, build on and leverage technology innovation, elicit and foster such innovation, and cause disruption, changing rules of the game and triggering new waves of technology innovation. As a separate type of innovation, BMI can be a source of competitive advantage superior to technology innovation. These findings suggest that focusing on technology innovation while downplaying BMI would result in only partial understanding of the sources of competitive advantage in the age of Industry 4.0..