Industry 4.0 ten years on: A bibliometric and systematic review of concepts, sustainability value drivers, and success determinants

The fourth industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, and the underlying digital transformation, is a cuttingedge research topic across various disciplines. Industry 4.0 literature is growing exponentially, overexpanding the current understanding of the digital industrial revolution through thousands of academic publications. This unprecedented growth calls for a systematic review of the concept, scope, definition, and functionality of Industry 4.0 to address the existing ambiguities and deliver a clear, comprehensive, and up-to-date overview of this phenomenon. Consistently, the present study carried out a systematic literature review of related articles, published online within the Industry 4.0 discipline until November 2020. The systematic literature review identified 745 eligible articles and applied extensive qualitative and quantitative data analysis to methodically answer the four research questions proposed. The study provides a descriptive assessment of eligible articles' properties and offers a unified conceptualization of Industry 4.0 and the underlying building blocks. The study further describes the value drivers of the fourth industrial revolution and identifies the conditions on which digital industrial transformation's success lays. The study also draws on the findings and offers important theoretical and practical implications, highlights the existing gaps within the literature, and discusses the possible future research directions. 1.IntroductionIndustry 4.0 is becoming popular exponentially among industrial, political, scientific, and academic communities (Beier et al., 2020; Rosa et al., 2020). Industry 4.0 involves the promise of a new industrial revolution, commonly labeled as the fourth industrial revolution (Mahmood and Mubarik, 2020; Wang et al., 2020). The first reference to Industry 4.0 occurred in 2011, yet, it is misleading to assume that Industry 4.0 is a sudden revolution utterly unaware of the industrial and technological revolutions that arose earlier (Liao et al., 2017; Oesterreich and Teuteberg, 2016). The first industrial revolution occurred by the end of the 18 th century, which centered around introducing machines into production. The second industrial revolution dates back to the early 19 th century, which involved the electrification of factories and the introduction of production lines. The third industrial revolution, also known as the digital revolution, is characterized by the introduction of digital technologies in production during the 1960s and 1970s. In reality, Industry 4.0 builds entirely upon the foundations of previous industrial revolutions (Culot et al., 2020). However, Industry 4.0 is expected to deliver the highest degree of digitalization, automation, virtualization, and decentralization across all industries, when coming to its maturity (Bordeleau et al., 2020; Theorin et al., 2017). The disruptive force of Industry 4.0 is argued to be massive, impacting the rules of competition, value delivery functions, labor market, socioenvironmental norms, and even educational priorities (Matthyssens, 2019; Sony and Naik, 2020). It is why international associations, governments, industrial communities, and academia have valued and prioritized the understanding of Industry 4.0 functions, capabilities, driving force, socioeconomic impacts, and future trends.The amount of hype surrounding Industry 4.0 has led to the overwhelming growth of academic publications during the past few years, from a handful of articles in 2014 and 2015 to the thousands of academic contributions in 2020. The sheer academic contributions have significantly advanced the current understanding of Industry 4.0 along with all its capabilities. The richness of Industry 4.0 literature has called for review studies to identify, synthesize, and categorize the existing scholarly literature on Industry 4.0 phenomenon and make the existing findings and evidence more comprehensible and accessible to industrialists, academicians, and decision-makers. The existing Systematic Literature Review (SLR) studies have strived to provide an overview of contributions done to various aspects of the Industry 4.0 phenomenon and address research gaps left unintended, enabling the scientific community to develop and propose more relevant and rigorous research agendas. Table A1 provides a concise review of the selected SLR articles published in the field of Industry 4.0. Previous SLR articles have addressed a wide variety of issues within the Industry 4.0 context, from broadly reviewing the Industry 4.0 phenomenon (e.g.,