Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Industry 4.0: Mindset Change is Key to Digitization Success

20 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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1:07

In this segment, the speaker emphasizes that successful Industry 4.0 digitization hinges on a fundamental shift in mindset rather than merely deploying new tools or platforms. Over a six‑to‑seven‑year journey, they learned that change management is critical: shop‑floor employees—referred to as “makers”—must be brought along, understand the purpose of new technologies, and see the broader strategic picture. Without this cultural alignment, workers revert to old habits, jeopardizing the initiative. The speaker underscores that engaging these frontline staff and managing the transition thoughtfully are essential to avoid failure.

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We definitely also see a lot of pushback, and that's something that we learned along the journey, that Industry 4.0 digitization is actually a lot of change of the mindset. You need to digitize your whole approach, not just bring in tools, not just implement the platform, because you need to take the people along. You need to have what we call our makers, our people on the shop floor, our employees, You need to bring them along. They need to understand what you're implementing, why they have to change what they're doing, and what the bigger picture behind that is. Because if they don't understand, the moment you look away, they're going to fall back to their old structures and their old ways of working. And with that, the whole initiative will fail. Right. So yeah, it's a big change in the plans. And change management is a big piece of it and needs to be taken care of. That's a big piece of the learning that we had over the past, I would say, 6 to 7 years that we've been working on this initiative.