Digital Change—New Opportunities and Challenges for Tapping Experience and Lessons Learned for Organisational Value Creation Edith Maier and Ulrich Reimer Abstract Digital change and Industry 4.0 do not erase the need for human insight or experience. This has been shown by a recent survey conducted among managers in the German-speaking world who still consider experience a highly valuable asset. Digital change, however, has shifted the focus from products to customers and implies new roles for employees such as supervising machines and processes, and assessing data analysis results. At the same time, new digital trends and tools open up new opportunities for automatically capturing, exchanging and preserving les- sons learned, and offer support that is both context-aware and situation-specific. Since they should not require any additional effort, digital trends and tools may also help remove a key obstacle to innovation, i.e. the failure to learn from mistakes. 1 Introduction Digital change is driven by big data, a dramatic drop in communication costs and sensor prices as well as production strategies such as agile manufacturing and mass customisation. This results in a fundamental transformation of the economy which is often subsumed under the label “Industry 4.0”. It holds out the promise of smart factories manufacturing products by largely autonomous systems that exchange data across the entire value chain (Ganschar et al. 2013). Is there still a role for human insight and vision in an era of self-organising and self-adapting ‘knowledgeable’ manufacturing systems (Yan and Xue 2007), deep learning and data-driven trend spotting? Will big data override experience and intuition, i.e. the largely tacit knowledge harboured by experts, when it comes to taking decisions in the future? Will Industry 4.0 therefore spell the end of decisions based on experience and domain expertise and replace them with decisions based on data and text mining to discern trends, market developments or hidden patterns E. Maier (&) Á U. Reimer University of Applied Sciences, St. Gallen, Switzerland e-mail: edith.maier@fhsg.ch © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 K. North et al. (eds.), Knowledge Management in Digital Change, Progress in IS, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73546-7_5 83