Five years after its founding, the Global Lighthouse Network, a World Economic Forum initiative in collaboration with McKinsey & Company, is no longer a vision but a proven reality. Network-designated Lighthouses can now be found across the globe. They represent every manufacturing sector and span more than 140 use cases and 130 member sites.
Global Lighthouse Network members have shaped the story up to this point, and their experience provides the foundation for the next chapter. What will it look like? To find out, we took a pulse check of both Lighthouses and non-Lighthouses to understand their experiences and priorities. Analysis of data drawn from the survey responses of leaders of 36 companies across the globe that represent a range of manufacturing industries has provided powerful insights.
Scaling across production networks and beyond: The high-impact lever
The second chapter of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has begun amid global disruption, marked by the increasing impact of climate change, inflation, soaring energy prices, supply chain volatility, and talent shortages. Confronting these challenges successfully requires manufacturers to meet a new scaling imperative not only within their own networks but also in collaboration up and down the entire value chain.
The results of our survey of Lighthouses and non-Lighthouses has revealed that productivity, sustainability, and resilience are the top three strategic priorities among respondents across all industries and regions. Two-thirds of respondents believe that scaling the Fourth Industrial Revolution is highly important for achieving these priorities. The next chapter of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, then, will chronicle the stories of successful scaling.
Scaling reality check: Revealing the truth
Executives often expressed confidence at the outset of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but a look at the current status of scaling progress provides a crucial reality check. Consider that among surveyed leaders of non-Lighthouses, an average of only 7 percent of the companies’ production networks are considered advanced in the use of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies. This is where the performance gap begins to emerge clearly between those companies and Lighthouses. Leaders of Lighthouses, on average, consider 20 percent of their production networks to be Fourth Industrial Revolution advanced.
That said, a second figure makes it clear that Lighthouses are doing something different. Unlike non-Lighthouses, their adoption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is ahead of plan. Regarding reported progress in scaling Fourth Industrial Revolution tech across multiple locations, Lighthouses are leading non-Lighthouses by a wide margin. And leaders of Lighthouses are more realistic than their peers about timing, with longer estimates for how long scale-up across at least half of their production networks will take.
Writing the scaling success story
What prevents scaling of the Fourth Industrial Revolution across production networks? Survey respondents agreed that external factors, such as supply chain snarls and inflation, matter. They also report that a lack of resources and capabilities constitute a major internal challenge. But leaders of Lighthouses more readily acknowledge the criticality of strategy for successful scaling—knowing what they are solving for, with goals aligned to business priorities.
The difference here is stark, with leaders of Lighthouses identifying the lack of a strategy as a key challenge nearly three times more often than those of non-Lighthouses do. Is the implication that Lighthouses lack strategy? No. Lighthouses still achieve three times the amount of non-Lighthouse scaling of Fourth Industrial Revolution tech. Instead, this finding suggests that Lighthouses are far more aware of the need for optimal strategy. Also, Lighthouse leaders are less likely than those of non-Lighthouses to report leadership or investment gaps, which may give Lighthouses an edge in turning strategy into reality.
Recognizing key enablers
The awareness gap between Lighthouses and non-Lighthouses becomes even wider for the key enablers to successful scaling of Fourth Industrial Revolution tech. For surveyed Lighthouse leaders, the key enablers are overwhelmingly about people. Five other enablers—industrial Internet of Things (IoT) stack, agile approach, tech ecosystem, agile digital studio, and industrial IoT academy—are viewed as considerably lower impact, together comprising the reported top enablers for fewer than one-fifth of respondents.
By contrast, among surveyed non-Lighthouse leaders, there is an outsize emphasis on one factor above all others: half list an agile approach as the top enabler. A combined 20 percent list either a tech ecosystem or an agile digital studio as the primary enabler. Only a combined 30 percent of non-Lighthouses leaders report workforce engagement (20 percent) and a transformation office (10 percent) at the top of their enabler lists—a difference in focus that may account for the gap in scaling success.
Scaling waypoints: Ready for others to follow
The experiences of Global Lighthouse Network companies have left waypoints to scaling Fourth Industrial Revolution tech in place. Non-Lighthouses now have a choice. They can do their own pathfinding, replicating the trials and errors already overcome by the Lighthouses. Or they can use the “smart follower” strategy, learning from leading companies’ use cases and methodologies to accelerate their progress and using the scaling waypoints that the Lighthouses have put in place.
