Chapter 2.1: The Role of an Entrepreneurial Mindset in Smart Manufacturing

The fourth industrial revolution has brought about many challenges to competitive industries. This new era of digitalization and machine-to-machine interaction involves significant data transfer and has primarily been analyzed from a technical and functional perspective. Nevertheless, these changes profoundly impact upon the human capital working in the industrial and manufacturing sector, in which the smart manufacturing approach tends to be more present. For this reason, this paper addresses the main challenges that will soon be faced by these types of workers— individuals who must become knowledge (or knowledge-based) workers. We have built a theoretical model to assist in identifying the micro-mechanisms that knowledge workers with more advanced entrepreneurial mindsets may use to perform more efficiently, resulting in them being actively sought after by organizations in the future. We infer that an entrepreneurial mindset which focuses on the metacognitive level will directly benefit individual performance in terms of increased knowledge creation.