The role of performance, barriers, incentives and complexity in Industry 4.0. Università di Torino

Over the last ten years (2011-2021), the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, has disrupted every economic industry, especially the manufacturing, where the phenomenon was born. Despite the great attention on the topic paid by policy makers, managers and academics, there is still a limited implementation of Industry 4.0 in firms. This is due to limited knowledge on real performance, to several barriers, and to the increased complexity. These issues are not always covered by the adoption of public incentives. For this reason, the research firstly carries out a quantitative analysis to sort out the real relationship between Industry 4.0 adoption and performance on a statistically representative sample of 1331 manufacturing local units. Then, the study deeply scouts, through a quantitative analysis, firms’ perception of performance, barriers and incentives and quantitatively verifies, on a statistically representative sample of 1732 manufacturing firms, the mediation role of barriers and incentives on the above mentioned relationship. Finally, the analysis deepens the perception and classification of barriers and explores the role of complexity in SMEs, through a qualitative analysis. The thesis contributes to enrich the literature by, on the one hand, identifying, classifying, and measuring key concepts related to Industry 4.0 and, on the other hand, testing solutions for Industry 4.0 implementation on more than 1,300 manufacturing firms, highlighting how to better target policies and technology adoption strategies. Over the last ten years (2011-2021), the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, has disrupted every economic industry, especially the manufacturing, where the phenomenon was born. Despite the great attention on the topic paid by policy makers, managers and academics, there is still a limited implementation of Industry 4.0 in firms. This is due to limited knowledge on real performance, to several barriers, and to the increased complexity. These issues are not always covered by the adoption of public incentives. For this reason, the research firstly carries out a quantitative analysis to sort out the real relationship between Industry 4.0 adoption and performance on a statistically representative sample of 1331 manufacturing local units. Then, the study deeply scouts, through a quantitative analysis, firms’ perception of performance, barriers and incentives and quantitatively verifies, on a statistically representative sample of 1732 manufacturing firms, the mediation role of barriers and incentives on the above mentioned relationship. Finally, the analysis deepens the perception and classification of barriers and explores the role of complexity in SMEs, through a qualitative analysis. The thesis contributes to enrich the literature by, on the one hand, identifying, classifying, and measuring key concepts related to Industry 4.0 and, on the other hand, testing solutions for Industry 4.0 implementation on more than 1,300 manufacturing firms, highlighting how to better target policies and technology adoption strategies.