Background: Advances in new technologies like the Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing are opening up new possibilities for manufacturing firms. The extent of these changes is expected to be far-reaching leading researchers to proclaim the fourth industrial revolution a priori. Within this development, Industry 4.0 presents the concept of how manufacturing firms want to meet these changes and benefit from newly created possibilities. However, while the technological aspects leading the introduction of Industry 4.0 have been subject to many studies, the managerial aspects on how to lead such an implementation have so far mostly been neglected.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the managerial challenges that companies might face when implementing Industry 4.0 and to draw conclusions on how they could be met.

Method: Our empirical study included a range of qualitative methods. After following a sampling strategy, semi-structured interviews were conducted with researchers, consultants, and plant managers located in Western countries. All collected data were transcribed, open coded and analysed using grounded analysis.

Conclusions: While managing people to welcome and embrace new processes as well as leading projects in general has been described in the literature concerning change and project management to some extent, we broaden this knowledge by providing a new Industry 4.0 related perspective and describe possible adaptations to meet the special characteristics of the concept. Further, we elaborated on how the right mindset of top management can influence implementation efforts. On top of the managerial issues described, we added an organisational perspective to the knowledge in the field, making first attempts at describing how a structural framework supporting the implementation could look like. Finally, we investigate how current ways of working might be affected by the implementation of Industry 4.0 and how these might change.