Advanced digital services in Italian manufacturing firms: technologies, capabilities and ecosystems

This work proposes to give an overlook of the most recently developed technologies available for the manufacturing firms with a focus on the PSS (Product Service System) project implemented by some Italian Manufacturing companies. In addition, the aim is to better understand which are the paths that can explain a business model innovation in the servitization process. This work is divided into four chapters. The first Chapter proposes to introduce some fundamental concepts in the field. A first part concentrates on the definition and description of Industry 4.0. while the second part focuses on servitization. In the last part of the chapter a union between these two topics is presented. The result is an overall look into the literature to better understand the theoretical background. The aim is to link two concepts that too often are treated separately but that co-live inside the firm. In Chapter 2 a more in-deep analysis of the set of technologies comprehended in the survey is proposed. The definitions of some important advanced technologies are reported. The second part of the chapter analyzes which internal and external factors can influence the servitization process of a firm. This part will be also fundamental to developing the empirical research in the following part. More in detail, it is necessary to understand the conditions specified in the developed model. Continuing, Chapter 3 presents a literature review of the concept of business model innovation in digitalization and servitization. In the first part the internal and external factors in servitization are described and detailed. The aim is to analyze business model innovation in the product-service system project of manufacturing companies. The purpose of the last two parts is to present an overview of the service BMI and explain how it can be enabled by the creation of new external relationships as networks, collaborations, and partnerships. The fourth and crucial Chapter analyzes the survey administrated to a sample of manufacturing Italian firms in collaboration with the Digital Lab of the University of Padua. The aim of the investigation is to understand if the presence of some conditions has a true impact on the business model innovation of those firms accordingly with the literature. More specifically the goal is to understand which conditions can lead to a major intensity of new external relationships and how this combination of variables can change accordingly with the size of the firm. In the first part of this Chapter, methodologies, purposes, and other applications are reported as well as the survey methodology. Later, two different analyses are developed. The first one is a descriptive analysis in which are presented all the answers obtained by the involved sample. While, in the second part, a Qualitative Comparative Analyses is developed. More specifically a set of Boolean variables are defined to carry out a crisp set QCA. The aim is to test some specifical academic assumptions and to investigate the paths that may lead to a BMI. The result will be then reported and discussed in the conclusive part of this study. Implications, limitations and possibilities for further analysis are also developed in this final chapter.