Accelerating the Impact of Industrial IoT in Small and Medium‑Sized Enterprises: A Protocol for Action

The report addresses the growing technological gap between large corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector during the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It identifies critical barriers to IIoT adoption—including lack of skilled talent, limited capital, and information asymmetry—and presents a four-pillar Policy Protocol (raising awareness, expert support, financial support, and collaboration environments) to mitigate these issues. The protocol was developed and tested through an agile co-design process in São Paulo, Brazil, with plans to scale the findings nationally and globally.

• Manufacturing SMEs are falling behind larger corporations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which threatens global industrial productivity and exacerbates economic inequality. In the EU, firms with over 250 employees are six times more likely than SMEs to utilize data from smart devices or sensors.
• SMEs face five primary categories of challenges when adopting IIoT: people and capabilities, business strategy/ROI/access to capital, infrastructure and processes, technology readiness, and ecosystem maturity.
• Information asymmetry exists between SMEs and technology vendors, often leading to 'vendor lock-in' or vendors pushing expensive solutions that do not meet the actual needs of the smaller firm.
• The proposed Policy Protocol focuses on four interrelated intervention areas: raising awareness (via maturity tools and demo factories), providing expert support (workforce and management training), offering financial support (grants and preferential loans), and fostering collaboration environments (online communities and hubs).
• A prototype tested with 10 SMEs in São Paulo's automotive and aeronautics sectors revealed that existing Brazilian funding tools were too focused on the implementation phase and relied exclusively on credit, neglecting the crucial problem definition and design phases.
• The Brazil prototype highlighted a critical lack of 'one-stop-shop' platforms for SMEs to access consolidated best practices and support services, leading to inefficiency and frustration during research.
• Maturity assessments of prototype SMEs showed that while leadership generally recognized the importance of IIoT, most firms lacked the internal knowledge to define a transformation roadmap or leverage data for value, with many still relying on manual paper-based reporting.
• The World Economic Forum and the Brazilian government aim to scale the Policy Protocol from a 120-company pilot in São Paulo to support over 2,000 manufacturing SMEs across Brazil by 2021 or 2022.

APA

World Economic Forum (2020). Accelerating the Impact of Industrial IoT in Small and Medium‑Sized Enterprises: A Protocol for Action. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Accelerating_the_Impact_of_IIoT.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Accelerating the Impact of Industrial IoT in Small and Medium‑Sized Enterprises: A Protocol for Action. 2020. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Accelerating_the_Impact_of_IIoT.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Accelerating the Impact of Industrial IoT in Small and Medium‑Sized Enterprises: A Protocol for Action |date=January 2020 |url=http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Accelerating_the_Impact_of_IIoT.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2020accelerating, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Accelerating the Impact of Industrial IoT in Small and Medium‑Sized Enterprises: A Protocol for Action}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2020}, month = jan, url = {http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Accelerating_the_Impact_of_IIoT.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }