The industrial revolutions

A large number of innovation researchers and analysts accord a great importance to a historical approach of innovation for various reasons. Indeed, innovation can be time and resource consuming, based on assumptions and speculations about the future and can be also considered uncertain to a certain extent. Therefore, the establishment of accurate innovation analysis requires not only a thorough comprehension of its history but mostly the understanding of its progression mainly through the multiple industrial revolutions.

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 First industrial revolution- 1765

This first revolution extends from the end of the 18^th century to the beginning of the 19^th century. During this period, mechanization emerged as a process that replaced agriculture with industry as the new basis of the economic structure of society. The most critical innovation throughout this phase was definitely the mass extraction of coal along with the creation of the steam engine invented a new kind of energy power that pushed ahead hard all the processes and procedures thanks to the construction of railroads and the rapid development of material, economic and human transactions. Innovation was therefore visualized during this first revolution as an economy-wide process including organizational, technological and institutional transformation and involving numerous fields and products.

(Sentryo, 2017).

 Second industrial revolution- 1870

A century later, at the end of the 19^th century, new technological developments initiated the emergence of new sources of energy; electricity, oil and gas. Consequently, the development of the combustion engine set out to use these novel resources to their fullest potential.

Additionally, the steel industry started to flourish and expand alongside the growing requirements and demands for steel. Also, chemical synthesis also matured to bring to the market synthetic fabric, dyes and fertilizer. Furthermore, communication tools had known a significant advancement through the emergence of the telephone and the telegraph, so was the case of transportation methods with the invention of automobiles and planes at the start of the 20^th century. These innovations were made possible thanks to the focus of research and capital structures on industrial and economic model based on new large factories and the organizational applications of production as conceived by Taylor and Ford. (Sentryo, 2017).

This second industrial revolution was known mainly by important organizational innovations that smoothed the way for connections between industry and formal science to become more solid especially through the 20^th century. These strong links changed the innovation concept in so many aspects. Indeed, the training for the would-be innovators started gaining a bigger role and the importance of artisanal ingenuity decreased. Therefore, external institutions that had the job to perform such formal training and research began being extremely important as well. (Bruland and Mowery, 2004).

 Third industrial revolution- 1969

In the second half of the 20^th century, a third industrial revolution emerged with the appearance of a new kind of energy with a greater potential in comparison with the other sources that is the nuclear energy. This period was characterized by the invention of electronics, with the transistor and microprocessor but also the rise of telecommunications and computers. This novel innovation has driven the production of miniaturized material which would ease the path to space research and biotechnology. This revolution was also considered as essential driver to the era of high level automation in production due to major inventions that are majorly automatons and robots. (Sentryo, 2017).

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 Fourth industrial revolution- 1969

As we have seen the first revolution used water and steam to mechanize production, the second utilized electricity to develop mass production and the third revolution employed electronics and information technology so as to automate production. As for the fourth revolution which is based on the third revolution and the digital revolution that has been taking place since the middle of the last century, has taken its origin with the emergence of the Internet. The fourth revolution is regarded as the first revolution to emerge from a new technological phenomenon that is digitalization instead of emerging from a new kind of energy. Digitalization has allowed companies all over the world to build a new virtual world where they could control the physical world. The ultimate goal of various industries today and tomorrow is to be capable of connecting all production means to enable their interactions and connections in real time. Factories 4.0 have now the possibility of achieving high levels of connections among various players and objects in a production line through the use of multiple innovations such as Cloud, Big data and Industrial IoT. Innovation through the fourth revolution has greatly evolved and went a long road deviating from the energy greed trend to a more technological aspect of things. Consequently, the rapid developments of innovative technological tools has led to a wide diversity of applications that can be deployed in the industrial sectors such smart predictive maintenance, enhanced decision-making in real time, forecasting inventory based on production and upgraded coordination among tasks, etc. It is expected therefore that all of these improvements would gradually optimize the production tools and open the doors for endless possibilities for the future of industry 4.0. (Sentryo, 2017).

The following figure summarizes therefore these four industrial revolutions explained all above.

Figure 5: The four industrial revolutions (Visiativ-industry, 2019)

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