The Role of Entrepreneurial Attitudes and Behaviors in Smart Manufacturing

The fourth industrial revolution has brought into the competitive arena many challenges. This new era of digitalization and machine-machines interaction with big flows of data has been mainly analysed from a technical and functional perspective. Nevertheless, this changes will heavily impact also on the human capital that works in the industrial and manufacturing sector especially, where the smart manufacturing approach is always more present. For this reason, this paper tries to address the main challenges that will be soon faced by this type of workers that need to become knowledge (or knowledge-based) workers. We have built a theoretical model that may help micro-mechanisms through which knowledge workers with higher entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours may perform better and thus they will be actively sought by organizations in the future. We infer that this attitudes and behaviours will directly benefit the individual performance in terms of higher knowledge creation. In addition, using the knowledge-based view theory, we explain how this increased performance may also improve organizational processes specifically the general knowledge acquisition of the firm. Keywords: