4.0 IR, Oversize Economy and the Extinction of Mammoth Companies

Abstract

The 4th Industrial Revolution (4.0 IR), fundamentally disrupts the technologies characterizing the first three industrial revolutions. In the nowadays global management phase (competitive globalisation), the business model based on excess supply (i.e., over-supply model, in which competitors face volatile production and progressively falling prices) is now inadequate for aggressive global corporate policies. Producing more and wasting less require today a new global business model based on the progressive disappearance of marginal global companies (oversize economy, characterized by lower production and sales costs, and by large company size). Standardized production has now fallen into a crisis that drives companies towards 4.0 technologies i.e., in the pursuit of new conditions of efficiency that are more open to innovation, towards productive flexibility, and even towards competitive imitation.