Abstract
The conceptual model proposed in this study is used to serve a guide for Industry 4.0 to understand the effect of GIC (green intellectual capital) and GKM (green knowledge management) on sustainability. Green challenge in Industry 4.0 has increasingly become a hot topic in both academia and practice. Among the Industry 4.0 topics, digital chain monitoring has a great impact on the performance of the company. The study of the industrial digital chain is a great green challenge in the 21st century in order to understand and manage the flows of green information. Knowledge of the human, relational, and structural (including technological aspects) will help to better understand and management the effects of traceability on sustainability. Several of the concepts and variables in the suggested model can easily be managed by organizations if they carefully measure their green intangible nature with smart sensors.
TopIntroduction
As companies entered into the 1990s, knowledge has become one of the most important strategic resources and one of the key economic resource and the dominant and perhaps even the only source of competitive advantage. Researchers have paid a great attention to the topic of intangible assets, often referred to as intellectual capital in the early 1990s. Intellectual Capital operates as the most important contributor to justify the value difference between market value and book value of many organizations. Intellectual capital has become critical to sustaining competitive advantage, organizational success, innovation, superior organizational performance, core differentiator operator, improve new product development performance, enhance shareholder value, create a framework that allows for describing all resources at the firm’s disposal and how they interact to create value, organizational performance, etc.
Green challenge in industry has increasingly become a hot topic in both academia and practice. Green challenge refers to the development or improvement of products and processes about saving energy, controlling pollution, recycling waste, and implementing environmental management. Green innovation is related to products, processes, and services to protect environments, which is a process that firms continuously launch and implement green activities involved in energy saving, pollution prevention, and environmental quality improvement to eventually achieve economic benefits (Chen, 2008). The shift from pollution control to prevention is a good first step, but companies must go further and there is more synergy than conflict between the conventional and environmental paradigms (Porter and van der Linde, 1995, Pujari et al. 2003, Eiadat,Kelly et al. 2008).
The industry 4.0 paradigm is currently one of the domains that presents high challenges for research and manufacturing experts. Among the industry 4.0 topics, digital chain monitoring has a great impact on the performance of the company. Currently, Meski et al. (2019), Dev et al. (2020 a, b), Jabbour et al. (2020) are interested in the study of the industrial digital chain in order to understand and manage the flows of green information generated and exchanged. The principles and technologies of Industry 4.0 can influence how products are manufactured, as well as customer’s perceptions of the value of products and green innovation. The use of knowledge-based frameworks is very trendy in the industrial field and represents one aspect in industry 4.0. The effectiveness, reliability and efficiency of this type of system depend heavily on how the knowledge base is structured and managed.
Sustainability has become a topic of interest for both academics and practitioners. A wide discussion and debates about the concept of sustainability, its important and the way to achieve it are pervasive. The economics profits of business activities have increased prosperity and living conditions globally: however it leads to environmental destruction and social inequality directly and indirectly.
Although the aim of sustainability is to keep balance of multidimensional performances, its meaning are inconsistent. In general, sustainability refers to the organizational aim to achieve profit and improve social development while accounting for environmental aspects.
Green Intellectual Capital is defined as sum of tangible resources or knowledge associated to the environmental protection or innovation (Chen, 2008, Liu, 2010, Huang and Kung, 2011). Three main components of GIC namely green human capital (GHC), green structural capital (GSC) and green relational capital (GRC). Few papers have focused on the green aspects of intellectual capital (GIC) and knowledge management (GKM) (Delgado et al. 2014, Yusoff et al. 2019, Yong, 2019, Wang et al. 2020). Nowadays, due to increasing concerns regarding environmental issues, it is essential to integrate the management of green intellectual capital and green knowledge management on Industry 4.0.
Figure 1. Model of management industry 4.0 and green intellectual capital
Key Terms in this Chapter
Green Intellectual Capital: Lopez-Gamero et al. (2011) proposed green IC as “the sum of all knowledge that an organization is able to leverage in the process of conducting environmental management to gain competitive advantage” (p. 21). Intangible assets can be said to be rare and not easily imitated ( Yong et al., 2019 ). Generally, the literature has identified three dimensions that encompass the classification of green IC, namely: green human capital; green structural/ organizational capital; and green relational capital.
Business Sustainability: Sustainability is a comprehensive approach to management of organizations which is focused on creating and maximizing long-term economic, social and environmental value. It is a response to the challenges of the modern world facing organizations from the public and private sectors (e.g., https://www2.deloitte.com/ru/en/pages/risk/solutions/sustainability-and-csr.html ).
SCM (Supply Chain Management): SCM is defined as identifying the strategic nature of coordination within a specific organization and across trading partners within the supply chain for the purpose of improving an individual organization’s performance and the performance of the whole supply chain ( Li et al., 2006 ).
Traceability: It is the identification of the product (the mechanical part in our case), as well as the analysis of its situation and the generation of reports, at each step of the manufacturing process, as soon as the raw material is acquired until the delivery of a finished product. Therefore, a better understanding of the specificities of the industrial information flow guarantees a good traceability of the implementation conditions, resources and the processes used, the standards that control their use, etc. ( Meski et al., 2019 ). Traceability is crucial for production monitoring, and automatically ensures product quality, customer satisfaction, and competitiveness of the industry.