Industry 4.0 calls for inventors

Industry 4.0 enters public debate mainly as a list of equipment: robots, sensors, data platforms, artificial intelligence on the production line. The European figures show an uneven distribution of this transformation. According to the International Federation of Robotics, average density in the European Union stood at 231 industrial robots per 10,000 employees in 2024, against a world average of 132, while Germany reaches 449. Eurostat shows that in 2025, 71% of European small and medium-sized enterprises had reached at least a basic level of digital intensity, against a target of more than 90% by 2030; Romania and Bulgaria had the smallest share of firms with very high digital intensity, at 2%.

These figures are usually read as a purchasing gap: whoever buys more equipment closes the distance. Our experience points to a second dimension, discussed more rarely — the capacity to conceive the technology, alongside the capacity to install it.

The buyer and the builder

A company that acquires an automated line gains immediate productivity. The intellectual property stays with the supplier, together with dependence on that supplier for maintenance, parts and new versions. Long-term added value accumulates where the equipment is designed.

An economy that intends to move up the value chain needs firms that produce the solution alongside those that use it. This is where inventors come in: in designing the equipment, in the sensor adapted to a local process, in modernising an existing machine so that it communicates with the rest of the plant.

Retrofitting, where patents are born

Most factories in Romania work with equipment installed years ago. Full replacement requires capital that few of them have. Modernising it — sensors added, new controls, integration into the data system — requires a technical solution for each case, and those solutions are patentable.

Retrofitting has a rare advantage: it starts from a real problem, posed by someone who needs the answer. That is precisely the situation in which technical creativity is exercised under authentic conditions, and in which a domestic inventor holds the advantage of proximity to the process.

The data, the skills and the distance between them

Eurostat shows that 20% of European enterprises used at least one artificial intelligence technology, 47% had bought intermediate or sophisticated cloud services, and 33% carried out data analytics with their own employees. An instrumented production line generates data from day one; making use of it calls for people who command both the technical process and the method of analysis.

Training those people is the business of technical education, and the core competence remains the same as for any invention: the ability to formulate the problem before looking for the instrument.

The standards are being written meanwhile

Interoperability, industrial security, traceability of production data — all of these are being regulated now, at European level. Countries with an equipment industry of their own take part in writing those standards, because they have something to defend. The presence of Romanian specialists in the technical committees is an investment with a long effect.

Industry 4.0 remains, in essence, a matter of technical creation applied at the scale of a factory. Buying equipment covers today’s gap; the capacity to conceive equipment decides the position ten years from now.

We hold that industrial digitalisation policy should explicitly include support for original technical solutions — design, patenting, integration — alongside support for procurement.