| Rev | Period | Driver | Products |
| 0 | 1700s | Humans | Agriculture, Philosophy, Arts, Crafts |
| 1 | 1800s | Engines | Locomotives, Ships, Bridges, Roads, Buildings |
| 2 | 1900s | Electricity | Houses, Cars, Consumer Products, Mass Entertainment |
| 3 | 2000s | Computers | Internet, Social Media, Gadgets, Global Supply Chain |
| 3.5 | 2010s | Connectivity | Sharing Economy, Commoditization, Distributed Systems |
| 4 | 2020s | Robots | Unknown (perhaps agile products from agile production) |
| 5 | 2030s? | Nature? | Clean Air & Water, Greenomics, Sustainability? |
Notes
- IR0 This was 1700s and before (earlier: Iron Age, Bronze Age, Stone Age)
- IR3 The advent of computers saw the addition of robotics to the factory floor and increasingly powerful design, simulation and control software.
- IR3.5 (our take) Industrial production took a big conceptual leap from factory floor to gadgets via software and apps. For example, a car can potentially be transformed from a personal product into a shared commodity.
- IR4 We lump Cloud, Big Data, IoT etc (the often mentioned components of IR4) into Robots. Just imagine a powerful robot which can sense via IoT, use the cloud, learn and does stuff. What stuff? We don't know, maybe like this.
- IR5 Just exploring some possibilities looking ahead. A product example could be Beyond Meat, whose share price rose 163% upon its IPO on Thursday (2nd May 2019), the best performing stock debut since 2008.