Abstract for: Virtuous and Vicious Cycles: Investigating the Collaboration Processes Needed to Build Industry 4.0-Ready Supply Networks

Small and medium-sized (SME) suppliers find that they are often too small to tender for OEM orders on their own, if they wish to do so their only option is to collaborate with other suppliers with an eye to inter-firm integration. However, the formation of such nascent supply networks with SMEs often fails, even though they are envisioned in industrial digitalisation policies (Kagermann et al., 2013, Smit et al., 2016). We therefore aim to investigate interdependencies between the disclosed barriers (Kazantsev et al., 2018) to forming such supply collaborations and how these can be overcome.