It's a big and transformative phenomenon worldwide, so of course it has a buzzy lexicon all its own. You can call it whatever you want - Digital Operations Technology, Industry 4.0, Industry of the Future, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Smart Manufacturing - but you can't ignore it. MESA International offers a concise definition for this wave of change: "Smart manufacturing is the intelligent, real-time orchestration and optimization of business, physical, and digital processes within factories and across the entire value chain."

Born two or three years after the invention of the World Wide Web, and just 12 or 13 years old when the invention of the smartphone changed everything, the latest cohort of millennials just graduated from college last spring. Now they are entering the workforce, where they will be joining their "digital native" predecessors, who already make up more than half of the workforce. And they are even more immersed in the technology and culture of the internet than their forerunners were.

Dassault Systèmes has signed a definitive share-purchase agreement to acquire Ortems, a provider of on-premise and cloud-based software for constraint-based production scheduling and dispatching.

You probably don't think of Henry Schein as a technology company. In fact, you probably don't think of Henry Schein at all. At No. 268 on the Fortune 500, it is one of the least known names on the list, in the most mundane of businesses - wholesaling supplies to dentists. But Henry Schein has managed to place itself at the center of a technological revolution. It has turned its dull-as-mouthwash catalogue business into the leading platform for digital dentistry, and increasingly for other medical practices.