Smart Industry and the confluence of standards

European industry has seen a notable structural change over the last 20 years whereby a substantial amount of industrial activity was off-shored to emerging economies taking advantages of low costs production centers abroad, thus increasing profitability of operations based in Europe. The relocation of industrial activities had several long term effects like decreasing rates of employment in traditional sectors and the rise of centers of global manufacturing, decentralized R&D and growing innovation power in emerging economies, notably the BRICS. As a response to this trend at the industry and policy realms, initiatives have been put in place with a vision to support a European industrial renaissance. Such initiatives aim to develop new lead markets with a dual strategy: on one side creating new technologies and services to be deployed internationally and on the other creating productivity and competitive gains to best position European products and technologies abroad. Currently many European countries are investing heavily in the fourth industrial revolution by embracing automation, data exchange and new manufacturing technologies. This is also called ‘Smart Industry’ (Netherlands), ‘Industry 4.0’ (Germany) or ‘Industrie du Futur’ (France) to mention some. In this paper we use the term ‘Smart Industry’ to refer to this trend. This trend is driven by ICTs and related technologies and is popularly seen as a new (r)evolution in industrial production. Smart Industry promises customised and error-free production in flexible and streamlined supply chains with dynamic cooperation between customers and suppliers. The overall goal is to increase competitiveness and to create new and sustainable jobs in manufacturing. From a technological point of view, Smart Industry is a confluence of different technologies such as fundamentally new production technologies like multilayer 3D printing, more flexible manufacturing lines using new tools and machinery, more networked and interconnected systems and processes, big data analytics technology to analyze data coming from both customers, the supply chain and sensors/equipment in the production line and last but not least increased collaboration in the supply chain using new technologies for semantic interoperability and data sharing. There is considerable enthusiasm regarding the promises of Smart Industry, but given its broad scope and the very many aspects of design, production, supply chain coordination and customer interfaces that require interoperability, its full adoption promises great opportunities regarding gains in productivity and competitiveness, but also considerable challenges, from the point of view of standardization. Some standards are taken up rather quickly, but others last decades before full adoption. The aim of this chapter is to provide insights into the role of (formal and informal) standardization to moderate the adoption of the fourth industrial revolution. In order to illustrate this, we use multiple case studies concerning Smart Industry fieldlabs in the Netherlands, and the approach taken for 5G standards development, a new standard for data transmission. The remaining of the chapter is organized as follows: In section 2 we will describe core concepts of standardization and smart industry. Section 3 presents some cases illustrating areas of standardization in Smart Industry and corresponding challenges. The last section offers some conclusions and reflections on the role of standards in the pace of diffusion of smart industry. "Share the link to this research as wide as possible!"