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Industry 4.0 envisions a future of networked production where interconnected machines and business processes running in the cloud will communicate with one another to optimize production and enable more efficient and sustainable individualized/mass manufacturing. However, the openness and process transparency of networked production in hyperconnected manufacturing enterprises pose severe cyber-security threats and information security challenges that need to be dealt with. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper presents a distributed trust model and middleware for collaborative and decentralized access control to guarantee data transparency, integrity, authenticity and authorization of dataflow-oriented Industry 4.0 processes.

The results of a performance study indicate that private blockchains are capable of securing IoT-enabled dataflow-oriented networked production processes across the trust boundaries of the Industry 4.0 manufacturing enterprise.

This paper contributes a decentralized identity and relationship management for users, sensors, actuators, gateways and cloud services to support processes that cross the trust boundaries of the manufacturing enterprise, while offering protection against malicious adversaries gaining unauthorized access to systems, services and information.

Despite several efforts during the last years, the web model and semantic web technologies have not yet been successfully applied to empower Ubiquitous Computing architectures in order to create knowledge‐rich environments populated by interconnected smart devices. In this paper we point out some problems of these previous initiatives and introduce SoaM (Smart Objects Awareness and Adaptation Model), an architecture for designing and seamlessly deploying web‐powered context‐aware semantic gadgets. Implementation and evaluation details of SoaM are also provided in order to identify future research challenges.

Industry 4.0 and the new technological transformation process it represents pose major challenges for the world today. Now, a new period has been entered, which will affect every point of daily life, from production to trade, and from health to entertainment. In terms of its scope and complexity, this period is unlike any that humanity has experienced before. The concept of Industry 4.0 is an external reflection of the innovations and applications made and to be made not only in today but also in the production methods of the future. Because this change and development occurs as a result of a certain accumulation and continues to occur continuously, it is evident that strategy is of great importance in today’s constantly changing and developing world. It is of great importance for leaders to develop strategies for evaluating the opportunity areas emerging by anticipating change in the Industry 4.0 process and to carry organizations and society into the future. Strategic leaders can do this effectively. At this point, strategic leadership is an important issue. Based on this idea, in this study, the strategic leadership issue from Industry 4.0 perspective will be examined in a theoretical context.

Currently, the expectancy that surrounds the Fourth Industrial Revolution, commonly referred to as Industry 4.0 (I4.0), is huge. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to unveil whether and how organizational and managerial practices are associated to different levels of adoption of I4.0 technologies.

To reach this aim, the authors carried out a survey involving Italian manufacturing firms. Then, the authors used a cluster analysis and t-test to analyze data.

Results show that two clusters of firms based on their level of adoption of I4.0 technologies (high vs low) can be identified. Then, using a t-test, the authors found statistically significant higher levels of a number of organizational and managerial practices for firms with a higher level of adoption of I4.0 technologies.

This paper contributes to the debate surrounding I4.0 by stressing the organizational and managerial challenges that firms willing to undertake an I4.0 transformation have to face, which goes beyond the sole application of I4.0 technologies.

Entrepreneurs and managers need to be aware that the path toward I4.0 requires not only focusing on the application of the I4.0 technologies, but also on the development of a series of organizational and managerial practices that become key to face the fourth Industrial Revolution.

The authors posit here that I4.0 requires firms to bridge the capability gap, as well as overcome cultural barriers preventing entrepreneurs and managers to change their way of doing business. To this regard, this study highlights I4.0 is an all-encompassing paradigm that involves many dimensions of the firm.

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of the literature addressing blockchain technology (BT) in general management and economics (GME).

A systematic literature review methodology is used to collect and analyze the literature.

Three clusters of research are identified, namely, law, economy and innovation. The use of BT in law areas fosters the registration of intellectual property (IP) rights, although conflict between some of BT applications and regulatory frameworks is present. Research on cryptocurrencies is of high interest to the economy today. In the innovation cluster, BT improves security, traceability and transparency in operations over supply chains. However, BT has many technical imperfections that hinder its wide adoption. Furthermore, the need for the full commitment of all business actors complicates its implementation. Research on BT is still at a nascent stage. Conceptual papers dominate the literature (18 theories are discussed). Eight main future research directions are described. For example, the relationship between the use of BT in supply chains and competitive advantage is not established; and quality standards for BT platforms are not developed.

The review is restricted to academic journals in the fields of GME, which limits the extent of the conclusions.

The paper synthesizes 47 studies published in academic journals, avoiding misleading claims and inaccurate information insofar as possible; and provides a spectrum of descriptive statistics and qualitative meta-synthesis analysis of the current literature.