The Post-Industrial Turn

Managing the technology turn of the post-industrial era is the focal point for profit generation. Turn is a short name for a radical change meant to last long. Industrial turns characterise paradigm shifts concerning the way goods emerge in the market. We are in the middle of an industrial turn enabled by technology. Nothing new here since technology was always responsible for changes, in general, within society. Although it is not society that drives technology, it is the society ordered by technology to use it to create more value for itself and, by doing so, motivates the development of further technology that recursively reorders society. Technology and, in general, innovations are not tools but media that release new possibilities within industrial Enterprises. New opportunities are related to how products are defined, designed, produced, sold and distributed, and how all these activities may complement each other to increase profit-facilitating complementarities. Under these premises, technology and especially information technology, mainly artificial intelligence, overturns industrial production in the fourth industrial revolution. Digitisation does not create profits automatically, but digitisation may create new possibilities for profit-making. The question addressed in this chapter is how to do it. The significant distinction between intelligence and information is that information in-forms, but to form, one needs to know how and what to include, transform and complement.