Internationalization via industry 4.0 technologies: application areas and future roadmap for international business

Industry 4.0 is transforming businesses offering multinational companies a technological framework to structure their global operations. This has attracted the attention of internationalization scholars and practitioners on the use of emerging technologies for it. In this paper, we seek to consolidate and synthesize the scholarly evidence published in leading international business journals on this issue. We identified 108 articles published in eight high-quality international business journals on major themes and applications of emerging technologies for internationalization. Our analysis, using the “coupling by document” method, identified the major application areas, including internationalization of research and development (R&D) activities, international ambidexterity, IoT-enabled global value chains, reshoring and location choice, digitized governance, global smart factory, global project management, global human resource management, and international relations and cybersecurity. We end our investigation by suggesting future research avenues.