From November 17th to December 1st, 2017, UNIDO brought together international leaders from the private sector, governments and academia for an elaborate series of technical discussions on Industry 4.0 and its global implications. TIV played an integral part in laying the contextual foundation for the panel sessions that followed, through the event’s foundational report titled “Industry 4.0: Opportunities Behind the Challenge.” The study served to establish 5 fundamental components for orienting thought on Industry 4.0, including: 1. the Paradigm, 2. Impact on Sectors, 3. Opportunities 4. Challenges and 5. the notion of a Human Centered Governance Model in Industry 4.0. With this framework in play, TIV members and the coauthors helped to deconstruct the unique facets of each component, such as changes in our schemas of “work”, human-technology interactions.

The investigation also delved into issues of economics (e.g. blockchain for supply chain), sustainability (e.g. smart grids), ethics (e.g. autonomous vehicle decision making) and law (e.g. intellectual property surrounding software and the inherent ‘black-box’ code of machine learning). Many of these concepts, and their related opportunities and challenges, set the tone of the 4-day event, as multiple high-ranking public officials and leaders of some of the largest companies in the world (e.g. Siemens Vienna, Alibaba Group, Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH) worked together to develop solutions for our digital future. The background report produced by TIV continues to serve as a source of thinking and action on emerging technologies and inform the activities of UNIDO and member nations. TIV experts have since been invited to present the key findings at numerous international fora, such as International Meeting in 2018 where we addressed Ministerial Senior Official Government Representatives and other international leaders.

There, at a seminal conference hosted by UNIDO in Bali, Indonesia on “Unlocking the Potential of Industry 4.0 for Developing Countries”,   TIV’s CEO, Ravi Gupta, was invited to present as a distinguished speaker. The conference was conceived as part of a collaborative effort by UNIDO, Indonesia’s Ministry of Industry and Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to spread awareness and encourage knowledge sharing around the challenges and opportunities of Industry 4.0. In particular, the event highlighted the current state of affairs within Asia and the Pacific and advocated for improved regional coordination.