THE INTERRELATION BETWEEN INDUSTRY 4.0. AND SOCIAL INNOVATION.

The unique contribution of this paper is the assessment of the interrelation between Industry 4.0. and social innovation, which is lacking in the academic literature so far. The data for the analysis is a result from an own survey developed and conducted under project "Possibilities and barriers for Industry 4.0 implementation in SMEs in V4 countries and Serbia", funded by the Visegrad Fund. By performing factor analysis five components forming social innovation based on previous studies (Klerkx et al.;2019b) are proved to have positive influence on the digital transition of small and medium sized companies in Central and Eastern Europe The factors are named as following: 1) Adoption of digital technologies; 2) Effects of digitalization on company's identity; 3) Ethics in digitising production systems and value chains; 4) Digitalization and innovation systems and 5) Economics and management of digitalized production. They could serve as a base for creating a business model, which could facilitate Industry 4.0. implementation in manufacturing companies in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]