The fourth industrial revolution is based on a few technological advancements that promise an industrial transformation based on achieving sharing and circular economies. Selecting and applying these advancements correctly, i.e., following relevant value drivers, is a key to the success of manufacturing firms. This results in an increasing body of knowledge from academy and practitioners in the domain of the adoption of digital technology in industry. Given the breadth of the topic, the literature deals with both a vast amount of promising technologies and related existing and prospect industrial application. This work focuses on the contributions in the production sub-domain of assembly systems and technology. In detail, relevant high-impact scientific and engineering works have been identified and analyzed with the purpose of highlighting the innovation patterns in term of the prominent technological advancement (push) and related application (pull). The results of the present study show that the most relevant areas of research are: (1) the Industrial Internet of Things, (2) Augmented and Virtual Reality as assistance to the assembly and applied to the training of operators, and (3) the horizontal and vertical system integration through Digital Twins (DT) and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). The prominent value drivers are the improvement of resources and processes as well as asset utilization and labor. Moreover, this work represents a first step towards a unitary framework to synchronize different research efforts in the domain of assembly and support the envisaged green industrial transformation.