Strategic technological trajectories in SMEs: An Analysis of Industry 4.0 Transformation through Managerial Sense-Making, Resource Mobilisation, and Ecosystem Engagement.

Across recent decades, Industry 4.0 has been widely promoted as a new industrial revolution aiming to improve companies’ efficiency and competitiveness through data-driven technological solutions. Yet behind this influential narrative lies a persistent conceptual ambiguity: Industry 4.0 remains differently defined and continuously reinterpreted across countries, sectors, and actors. In industrial SMEs, this ambiguity becomes especially salient, as managers are expected to embrace Industry 4.0 while operating under resource constraints and everyday operational pressures. To address these challenges, existing research often focuses on technology implementation, readiness models, and success factors, and in doing so tends to approach Industry 4.0 as a relatively stabilised and prescriptive object. This thesis takes a different perspective. Rather than treating Industry 4.0 transformation as the linear adoption of technologies enabled by predefined roadmaps, it conceptualises it as a situated, interpretive, and multi-level process. It examines how managers of industrial SMEs perceive and strategically navigate Industry 4.0 transformation by constructing its meaning, mobilising evolving configurations of resources and constraints, and engaging with fragmented external support environments.
Drawing on empirical research with Walloon industrial SMEs, the findings show that Industry 4.0 unfolds through heterogeneous trajectories, reflecting the ways managers connect technological possibilities with strategic priorities, organisational resources, and their own 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 navigate transformation by selecting, adapting, or distancing themselves from available narratives, resources, and support mechanisms. By bringing managerial perceptions and actions to the centre of analysis, this thesis challenges deterministic views of Industry 4.0 and proposes to understand SMEs’ transformation as a co-constructed process, emerging through the continuous interplay between managers, their organisations, and their environments.