Making Industry 4.0 Their Own: Change Strategies in SMEs

Drawing on a study conducted among Belgian companies, this practitioner-oriented article shows that Industry 4.0 is neither a universal model nor a linear pathway. It depends on a subtle interweaving of resources, priorities, constraints, and organizational capacities. Four strategic logics emerge—Coordinators, Balancers, Pioneers, and Adjusters—each illustrating a distinct way of “making do”: with the means available, the skills at hand, internal tensions, and external contexts. This analysis reminds us that digital transformation is above all a human and organizational process, grounded in interpretation, trade-offs, and the meaning given to change.