Inovações Tecnológicas da Indústria 4.0: aplicações e implicações para a siderurgia brasileira

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has become the theme of the moment and has gained more and more space in political and business discussions. Their technologies represent a range of opportunities and challenges for various industries and at the same time, uncertainties about their impacts. The based on Neoschumpeterian approach to technology and economic change, which proposes innovation as a central element to the development of economic activity and transformation of productive structures, the objective of this work is to identify the relevant technologies of Industry 4.0 and its applications and implications for the Brazilian steel industry. It’s considered the hypothesis that the technology clusters of Industry 4.0, in general, do not significantly change the productive structure and barriers to entry steel production chair, but contribute significantly to raising the competitiveness of these companies. To this end, it is presenting in detail the main technologies of Industry 4.0 and its applications to the steel industry. Based on questionnaires applied to a specific group of companies in the Brazilian steel industry, were raised the main applications and implications for the Brazilian steel industry. The main results of the survey show that the technologies of Industry 4.0 tend to improve the operational efficiency and productivity of the steel industry rather than to revolutionize it, while maintaining the minimum production scale of the production plants or specific equipment. Regarding its application in the productive stages, the results leads to that in steel reduction and refining stages are the best opportunities for application of the technologies of Industry 4.0. In terms of changes in the Brazilian steel structure, it was observed that the Technological Clusters tend to favor established companies, but without substantial changes in entry barriers. In addition, the study shows that the technological gap between Brazilian steelmakers can be widened, thus increasing the heterogeneity among companies.