Spatio-economic implications of Industry 4.0 in relational perspective: innovation, evolution, organization and interaction; analyzed for the example of the German textiles industry

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The catchword Industry 4.0 significantly marks recent public debates on technology based development trends of industrial production in Germany. This notion is connected with expectations of a veritable paradigm shift: By implementing Internet-based technologies of coordination and communication (so called Cyber Physical Systems) through all stages of the industrial value chain, the actors, products and services involved in the production process become interconnected in unprecedented ways. Industry 4.0 offers extended options of improved efficiency and new business models in the entire production system. Research on the issue is needed since, despite of the eminent public attention devoted to Industry 4.0, there is hardly any substantial knowledge about its locational requirements and potential effects. While the technology foundations are already known and constantly further developed, only vague ideas exist on how technology application could proliferate in several industry sectors, affecting the organization of labour within and between firms as well as their interaction with institutional and locational contexts. Accordingly, the project investigates through an interdisciplinary approach of economic geography, textile technology/ engineering, and economic, social and technology history, which spatial implications could be associated with Industry 4.0 in the future, relating to context conditions as well as effects of technology application. Conceptually, research draws on the relational economic geography framework, as the dimensions of innovation, evolution, organization and interaction seem to fit particularly well to analysing the regarded process field and can be broadly addressed by the interdisciplinary project team. Empirical works focus on the textile industry sector with its longstanding tradition of technology-induced ruptures at locations in Germany. For achieving a viable assessment of the changes induced by Industry 4.0 in terms of the corporate and spatial interaction of actors, economic geographers need to join forces with researchers from complementary scientific disciplines. This is why the project integrates specialized engineering science expertise to capture the essential innovation/ technology trends in the textile sector and their organized implementation in firms. And including expertise of economic and technology history science when studying this history-charged sector allows to learn from earlier paradigmatic changes and evolutionary trajectories for the current case. The interdisciplinary approach shall creatively inspire project work both conceptually and methodologically; it offers to combine methods of historical document and data analysis (retrospective forecasting), geographical empirical social research, and profound analysis of corporate technology systems under the overarching umbrella of scenario analysis.