At a glance: who we are

EIIR, after extensive consultations with its key stakeholders across academic/research institutions, business organizations, and the policymaking community at national, regional and EU levels, has launched a long-range interdisciplinary research program on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (henceforth 4IR). The goal of the program is to analyze the 4IR as a historical phenomenon, map and assess its main drivers, impacts and ‘enabling framework conditions’ for its realization and the possible future development scenarios embedded in it, in the context of the challenges associated with the Covid pandemic and the emerging and uncharted geopolitical and geo-economic landscape. The methodological canon underpinning the research is that the potential benefits of the 4IR are neither pre-determined nor automatically given by the technologies involved. The program focuses on two broad broad sets of dynamics associated with two distinct but interrelated visions: the techno-economic paradigm of Industry 4.0 and the more recent socio-technical paradigm of the concept of Industry 5.0. Read a detailed description of the program here.