On May 6, 2026, Anastassiya Zabudkina will publicly defend her thesis entitled:

"Strategic Technological Trajectories: An Analysis of Industry 4.0 Transformation Through Managerial Sense-Making, Resource Mobilisation, and Ecosystem Engagement"

at 15:00 at HEC Liège, Classroom -1/89 (N1d Building)

Please register here

Jury members 

• Prof. Olivier Lisein (supervisor) – HEC Liège
• Prof. François Pichault (co-supervisor) – HEC Liège
• Prof. Nicolas Neysen (Chair of the Jury) – HEC Liège
• Prof. Christian Defélix – Grenoble IAE-INP, Université Grenoble Alpes
• Prof. Julian Müller – Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

Summary

Across recent decades, Industry 4.0 has been widely promoted as a new industrial revolution, offering firms a set of technological solutions to remain competitive. Yet, behind this apparently coherent narrative lies a persistent ambiguity: the concept itself remains unstable, interpreted differently across actors, contexts, and situations. In small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this ambiguity becomes especially salient, as managers engage with evolving and sometimes conflicting representations of what Industry 4.0 entails, while dealing with limited resources and immediate operational pressures of their firms. Although existing research has extensively examined technologies, the constraining and enabling conditions for their implementation, and models to assess SMEs’ readiness and maturity for such a transformation, it tends to treat Industry 4.0 as a relatively stabilised object. This research develops an alternative perspective by examining how managers of industrial SMEs perceive and strategically navigate Industry 4.0 transformation. Rather than approaching transformation as the application of predefined models, it conceptualises it as a situated and interpretive process. Drawing on four complementary studies combining literature review, survey data, and in-depth interviews with managers of Walloon industrial SMEs, the analysis investigates how managers make sense of Industry 4.0, mobilise internal resources, and engage with external support ecosystems.

The findings show that Industry 4.0 does not unfold as a unified or linear transformation. Instead, it emerges through heterogeneous technological trajectories, reflecting the ways managers connect technological possibilities with strategic priorities, organisational resources, and personal perceptions. The conceptual diversity of Industry 4.0 thus appears as the very condition under which managerial action is shaped, rather than as a problem to resolve. Instead of simply responding to external pressures, managers actively shape transformation by selecting, adapting, or distancing themselves from available narratives, resources, and support mechanisms. Their strategic choices thus emerge from ongoing trade-offs between their understanding of Industry 4.0 and institutional norms, SMEs’ heterogeneous resource configurations and prescriptive roadmaps, as well as between external support design and lived experiences of this support. By bringing managerial perceptions and actions to the centre of analysis, this thesis challenges deterministic and technology-driven views of Industry 4.0. It proposes instead to understand transformation as a co-constructed process, where SMEs’ trajectories are continuously shaped through the interplay between managers, their organisations, and their environments. In doing so, it uses the paradigm of Industry 4.0 to offer a more grounded and nuanced understanding of transformation in SMEs, highlighting that what matters is not only what technological solutions are available, but how they are interpreted, mobilised, and enacted in practice.